Bitcoin has finally hit $100,000. It took the world’s largest crypto asset a decade and a half to go from being worth less than a cent to being six-figure.
Bitcoin enthusiasts and investors are already on their next target— just how long would it take the world’s largest crypto asset to be worth a million dollars?
But while it took BTC seven years to 10x its value from 10K to $100K, meme coins have seen their value rise as much as 1000x in a matter of days to months. However, the reason for this is the market cap and liquidity.
Bitcoin is a nearly $2 trillion market cap cryptocurrency that handles $160 billion in daily trading volume. Meanwhile, the entire crypto market capitalization is just $3.75 trillion, so BTC basically accounts for over half of that.
Unlike BTC, a coin with a low market cap and trading volume is pretty easy to move. And because even small buy orders can send a coin to new highs easily, traders utilize them as a way to speculate and make quick profits.
The likes of Bitcoin, unlike altcoins and meme coins, are utilized by traders and investors as a way to invest in the long term and secure their wealth. This is something that meme coin traders should never forget — meme coins are the gateway to having fun and making quick and sizable profits, but they better sell on time before it all becomes zero.
That’s not to say that your Bitcoin investment won’t lose its value—it will when the bear market comes. However, if you end up not selling your Bitcoin, it’s highly probable that you’ll have a chance to sell it when the bull market returns. This is because Bitcoin has solidified its position as an asset class, having been battle-tested and now gaining broader institutional support via exchange-traded funds (ETFs).
But the same cannot be said for your meme coins, which may never see the light of the day once their time is over. So, for a trader to get better returns from meme coins, they must understand the difference between investing and speculation.
Investing Vs. Speculation
What separates an investment from a speculative trade is your mindset and the level of risk involved. That’s the main difference, though the line between the two can often be very thin, as what’s speculation for one could be an investment for another.
Generally, if something is high-risk, it is categorized as speculation, while lower risk is attributed to investing.
So, when you spend money with the expectation that the thing you put your funds on will return you a profit, that is investing. Essentially, you take an average or below-average risk to generate a satisfactory return on your capital.
Here, you expect your investment to increase in value over time. Also, this approach is usually taken with a long-term perspective, which could be anywhere between over a year to decades, with an aim to build your wealth gradually.
Moreover, your decision here is based on a reasonable judgment, which you have made after performing a thorough investigation and gaining enough understanding of your venture’s soundness, which points to a good probability of success.
Equity stocks, bonds, mutual funds, ETFs, real estate, and market instruments are some examples of investments.
Now, if you take a position in an asset and expect it to move in a certain direction, you are speculating. If you enjoy the thrill of volatile market conditions and use the market momentum to capture price movements, you are again speculating.
In this approach, you purchase and sell assets over a short period of time to generate profits. It involves frequent buying and selling of an asset, often jumping from one trend to another, which means emotions tend to play a big role here.
Not only do you disregard any fundamentals, but you also see a high probability of failure. Success or failure here largely depends on external forces or events that are outside of your control.
Unlike speculation, which usually means putting your money into something and praying for good results, investing involves analysis. You put in your time and energy to study fundamentals and use it as a basis for your investment.
Speculation also does not have much to do with protecting your wealth but rather increasing it quickly. In contrast, with investment, wealth protection is as much part of the process as wealth creation. Derivative products like futures and options come under speculative investment options.
Interestingly, for a non-crypto native, cryptocurrencies fall under speculative investment, but as we saw this year, with ETFs, Bitcoin has become a legitimate asset class, providing institutional investors a way to diversify their assets.
For a crypto-native, majors like Bitcoin and maybe even Ethereum fall under investment, while the vast majority of altcoins, specifically meme coins, are just speculative trading.
So, what makes meme coins so speculative? Also, what exactly are they, and where does their value really come from?
A Look into Memes and Meme Coins’ Value
Meme coins are the most profitable narrative of this cycle, and they have captured a lot of attention. But before we get into meme coins, let’s first understand the concept of memes.
You may feel that memes are an Internet phenomenon, but that’s not the case. Actually, memes can trace their origins to centuries before when they were used as a way to communicate.
The term ‘meme’ was first introduced by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book, “The Selfish Gene,” to describe the concept of cultural transmission.
According to Webster’s New World College Dictionary, a meme is defined as “a concept, belief, or practice conceived as a unit of cultural information that may be passed on from person to person, subject to influences in a way analogous to natural selection.”
The term’ Internet meme’, meanwhile, was coined by Mike Godwin in 1993 to describe how memes spread through online communities. The emergence and popularity of social media have accelerated the speed at which memes proliferate the online world.
Today, memes are an integral part of Internet culture, which helps people come together through humor and gain a sense of belonging to a community. The key elements of memes are their viral distribution and constant evolution.
Now, meme coins are simply the financialization of memes. A cryptocurrency, when named after animals, characters, or individuals in an attempt to attract a user base, is a meme coin. Much like any other crypto, the underlying technology here is blockchain.
But, unlike utility coins like ETH, which serve a purpose in this ecosystem, meme coins have no purpose other than offering a fun asset to learn about crypto and invest in to generate huge returns. Meme coins promise no fundamentals or inherent value other than creating a vibrant community of like-minded individuals.
Given that meme coins remove any pretense of utility and are simply driven by hype, FOMO, and momentum, they are extremely risky and highly volatile. And that’s exactly what makes them so popular in retail.
The meme coin frenzy first gained traction this cycle in 2023 when PEPE, an inspiration from the popular Internet meme’ Pepe the Frog,’ captured the market’s attention and saw an explosive increase in its value. This ignited the meme coin mania, which only allowed it to grow substantially higher.
This year, the meme coin craze has risen beyond the wildest of imaginations, with new coins popping up every hour. The cheaper and faster blockchains like Tonchain and Base have been helping the meme coin trend thrive, with Solana at the center of it all. As the biggest beneficiary of the memecoin frenzy, Solana-based memecoins account for almost a fifth of the market value of meme tokens.
A New Breed of Meme Coins: Easy Come Easy Go
Solana isn’t alone in fueling the memecoin craze; rather, it’s Pump.fun, which is the fastest-growing crypto app in history that allows anyone to create new tokens in a minute for completely free.
The biggest driver of the ongoing meme coin madness is Pump.fun’s growth wasn’t gradual but rather sudden and explosive. In February, less than a hundred coins were being launched a day on it, which has since skyrocketed to tens of thousands every day nowadays.
While Pump.fun made it easy to create new meme coins, DEXs were already there to help people start trading right away. Unlike a CEX, there’s no need for listing; the project provides the liquidity, and you are good to go. And this led to an eruption of meme coin mania, which is amplified by social media posts showing individuals turning their dollars into millions.
While it’s easy to start feeling FOMO with people bragging about bagging millions, it’s not as widespread as one might believe. In fact, the reality is that most people lose money by trading meme coins rather than making profits.
As per data from Dune, fewer than 3% of traders made more than $1,000 profit from investing in these speculative coins, while 0.8% have made over $10,000, and the bulk of traders, at over 60%, are incurring losses. Meanwhile, the platform itself (Pump.fun) is raking in millions of dollars in revenue and is now planning to launch a pro-trading terminal and its own token.
Among the new line of meme coins, there’s another category: celebrity meme coins, which might be the most fleeting ones ever, as well as net negative for the crypto industry. One may think that they would help gain crypto adoption, but the fast-paced crypto’s low barriers to entry only end up attracting bad actors.
Celebrity tokens are nothing but crypto that derive their value from the personality who launched them or whose name they bear. However, despite carrying the name of a celebrity, it’s possible they may not be launched or promoted by them.
The total market cap of celebrity coins is $113.7 million, as per Coinmarketcap. Currently, the biggest celebrity coin is MOTHER from music artist Iggy Azalea. The $65.8 million market cap token is currency trading at $0.065, down 72.68% from its peak of $0.240 from six months ago.
In 2nd place is the $45 mln market cap DADDY from Andrew Tate, and then the $395K market cap JENNER from Caitlyn Jenner is in 3rd place, down 74% and 95% from their respective ATHs.
Much like these, most of the celebrity tokens have been launched only to be dumped soon after and are now barely worth anything.
Most recently, Hailey Welch, a.k.a the Hawk Tuah Girl, launched her memecoin $HAWK on Solana, which didn’t even survive for an hour before plunging hard. As soon as the token launched, the initial surge saw its market cap rising as high as $500 million before tanking to $60 million in a mere 20 minutes.
The crash cost many their “whole life savings,” igniting the calls of “rug pull” and “pump-and-dump” crypto scam. Some buyers took to Crypto Twitter to accuse Welch of orchestrating an exit scam and said that they would take legal action against her.
One X user talked about losing their “life savings and children’s college education fund,” while the other one pointed out how a vast majority of coins were held by an insider, only to be dumped on the retail.
While some feel for those who have suffered grievous losses, others can’t help but point out how the very purpose of meme coins is to get in and out of a trade before others. “It’s a game of musical chairs,” said crypto trader Huss in a post on celebrity tokens earlier this year.
“When they’re right, they’re geniuses, but when they’re wrong, they were scammed and want reparations.”
– Huss recently said in another post on X.
Back in June, X user Slorg created a list of these celebrity coins and found that they had an average decline of 94%. Most of these new coins are also released on Solana through Pump.fun.
Celebrity-linked projects aren’t anything new. Back in 2017, boxer Floyd Mayweather and actor Jamie Fox promoted ICOs. Much like meme coins in this cycle, over 80% of 2017 ICOs were scams, including those associated with celebrities. The same was seen during the 2021 bull season when Mayweather, again, along with the likes of Jake Paul, DJ Khaled, and David Dobrik, promoted scam NFT projects.
So, this has been happening since the beginning of crypto and will continue to happen, but that’s not to say that there aren’t better and more honest ways to achieve this. Also, investors must be more careful when interacting with these speculative coins, as there are meme coins that tokenize culture and have value.
Meme Coins That Stand Out
Every meme coin is not the same. Much like how BTC has stood the test of time, there are a few meme coins as well that continue to survive year after year.
The OG Dogecoin (DOGE) leads this pack, which was created eleven years ago as a joke but soon found its place in people’s hearts and portfolios. This meme coin played a huge role in onboarding mainstream investors and traders to crypto, who were overwhelmed with the technical complexity of the space.
Dogecoin gained significant attention during the last bull market when Tesla CEO Elon Musk came out in support of it. In fact, US President-elect Donald Trump has created a specific department, ‘Doge,’ – The Department of Government Efficiency, which he wrote on his social media platform, “will become, potentially, ‘The Manhattan Project’ of our time.”
The department is to be headed by the tech billionaire and fellow entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who recently met behind closed doors at the Capitol to discuss the DOGE initiative and reportedly talked about keeping a ‘naughty and nice’ list of those who will be part of the budget-slashing proposals and those who won’t.
Then, during the last bull run, we got many new meme coins, most of which are simply lost or irrelevant, but the likes of Shiba Inu (SHIB) and Floki have still managed to maintain their presence among the top 100 crypto assets and in people’s minds.
Interestingly, during the past cycles, meme coins pumped toward the end of the bull market, but this time around, they have been experiencing capital rotation throughout the cycle. Before even the Bitcoin halving occurred, meme coins continued to attract interest and capital, even when BTC had its consolidation between March and October this year.
The meme coin market capitalization actually makes up 3.16% of the total crypto market cap, up from 1.3% at the beginning of the year. Excluding majors, such as BTC and ETH, this share rises to 11.21%, up from 4.2%.
This makes sense, given that among the top 100 crypto assets, meme coins are the biggest gainers this year, with WIF’s 2,165% year-to-date (YTD) gains and PEPE’s 1,578% upside. These two have been among the most popular meme coins, along with BONK, FWOG, BRETT, PNUT, and POPCAT, during this cycle.
Conclusion
So, as we saw, meme coins are the hottest trend of this bull market, offering an enticing opportunity for retail to make the best of it.
The fun element combined with their low entry point makes meme coins a magnet to new investors who get lured in by people flashing their big ‘1 SOL to $1 million’ gains from meme coins. Instead of treating it like a game of hot potato, they mistake it for an investment or simply hold it for too long in the hope of bigger gains, and they eventually end up giving up all of their profits.
It is important for those putting their money into meme coins to understand and remember that the vast majority of these meme coins become irrelevant when their underlying connection to social events becomes stale. So, make sure not to lose sight of your goal, which is quick profits.
Speculation is a great way to make sizable returns in a very short period, but that’s what it is. It’s not an investment, and meme coins should never be treated as such because they are driven by hype and momentum, and when the music stops, you don’t want to be holding them, or you’ll be left with significant losses, “but as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance”!
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