'A new breed of yolo-ing investors, guided more by Tik-Tok than financial advisors, threw money at memes like Shibacoin, Grumpy Cat, Disaster Girl, and Harambe, which sold for eye-popping prices. Memes were the new stocks.' jeffwilser CoinDeskTurns10
Chris Torres liked to doodle. He was good at it. Maybe he could use that skill for charity? In 2011, when the Tōhoku earthquake ravaged Japan, the Red Cross needed donations. So Torres, then 25, went on a livestream and created real-time sketches; he donated tips to the Red Cross.
Some view the sale of the Nyan Cat NFT as the birth of crypto’s “meme economy.” Others trace it to Dogecoin. Whatever the origins, Web3 injected energy and money into memes, and memes injected energy and money into Web3. In 2021, this exploded. The price of the original memecoin, Dogecoin, soared from less than a penny to over 75 cents, briefly notching a market cap of over $90 billion.
The meme-economy spread love, the meme-economy spread money. And the memes injected rocket fuel into the last bull run. Some of the memes are obvious, some are more subtle. “Michael Saylor’s laser eyes, that’s a meme,” says Amanda Cassatt, founder of Serotonin. And that meme had impact. “One of the factors that brought us out of the last bear market was the institutional endorsement of MicroStrategy putting bitcoin on the balance sheet,” says Cassatt.
Memes and crypto were a natural fit. “Crypto people are almost by definition extremely online,” says Kala, adding that the “crypto community has never taken itself too seriously,” which makes for a “cultural alignment.” Back in the heyday of 2021, Lachance told me that he considered the Doge to be the “modern Mona Lisa.” I took this as a joke. But Lashes is now making a sober and thoughtful case for memes as art -- modern-day Warhol. He notes that the first Grumpy Cat photo was shared by someone who had never posted before. They weren’t an influencer. They had no platform. They simplythat said “Meet Grumpy Cat;” overnight it had thousands of upvotes.
That community was needed in the depths of COVID. “I think people were searching for something to connect to, and to feel like they had purpose,” says Julia Love, who, during COVID, raised a six-year-old daughter while working from home. She found her tribe with weekly Zoom parties for the DDP, or “Doge Disco Party,” where she’d create elaborate outfits and “get really silly,” like the time she and her daughter dressed up as robots and “did the robot” for an hour.
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