MEME RUSH! An industry source told me over margaritas a few weeks ago, “You’re starting to hear venture capital firms make the argument that meme coins are becoming an investable asset class.” What’s undeniable is that meme coins are popping, and there does appear to be a thriving industry in promoting them. In April alone, CoinMarketCap added 138 meme coins to its listings, versus 18 in the same month a year earlier, bringing the total to 2,229, with a market capitalization of more than $50 billion, as reported by our Omkar Godbole. Last week, VanEck, a crypto-friendly institutional investment firm, started a new Meme Coin Index, tracking prices of doggy-themed tokens dogecoin (DOGE) and dogwifhat (WIF) as well as other ridiculousness like BONK. Another dog token, FLOKI, shared the title sponsorship for a cricket series between Pakistan and Ireland. Crypto analysts are talking up the election-related meme coins TRUMP and BODEN, and tokens associated with the X-Men character Wolverine flooded several blockchains after TheRoaringKitty, the personality behind the GameStop meme stock frenzy, posted a related video on X. Even independent Bitcoin programmer Jimmy Song, often a vocal critic of non-Bitcoin token creation, wrote in a Substack post that he appreciated the “honesty” of the movement: “Meme coins obsoleted the VCs and ultimately brought some more honesty to the Nietzschean will-to-power games that were always being played.” Speaking of Bitcoin, the OG blockchain now has meme coins too, many of them created with the Runes protocol launched last month. Sovryn, a decentralized trading platform with Ethereum-compatible smart contracts and secured by Bitcoin through merge-mining on the Rootstock sidechain, announced Wednesday that it has created a fully-premined rune called POWA, airdropped the tokens to users and established pools for trading them. “Runes provide a way for projects to create and distribute tokens natively on the Bitcoin blockchain for memes,” Sovryn said in a press release.
