Memecoins. This cycle's contribution to the narrative that crypto is nothing more than a casino.
It's sad, really. What is fundamentally a fundraising tool has instead become a way for insiders to purloin "dumb" money from people who buy in at the top thinking the price will continue to go up. The way it works is remarkably simple. The insiders get together on a Telegram group, agree to pump a memecoin at a specific time, and then pull out once the price reaches a certain level. Anyone buying a ticket to the moon becomes "exit liquidity" for the insiders.
Few in ReFi have attempted to leverage memecoins as a fundraising tool and it's not hard to understand why. Capturing "dumb" money isn't in the spirit of regeneration. As is so often the case in any financial market, it feels wrong for people in the know to take advantage of those who are not.
At the same time, ReFi seems to be taking a very narrow approach to memecoins. Instead of innovating on perhaps the best fundraising tool out there right now, we shy away. We ignore tools in the Farcaster and Solana ecosystems that allow people to deploy memecoins on bonding curves and pass on trading fees to the creator; we avoid using our creativity to produce memes that have staying power and evolve into communities. Instead, we maintain that memecoins should be avoided, despite a desire to lure degen capital into the space.
There is, of course, no guarantee of success. But why aren't we experimenting like we did with NFTs? What's holding us back from finding the ways memecoins can power ecological and social impact?
At the very least, it would help if we stopped seeing memecoins as a casino and started seeing them as a tool. Maybe then the innovation would start to flow.
We'll leave you with a short anecdote:
We once had an idea here at CARBON Copy to launch climate memecoins as a way to raise money for quadratic funding rounds that fund climate solutions. Instead of trying to source the funding from selling the tokens, however, we wanted to allocate 99% of the trading fees to the funding rounds. Our share of the tokens would be burned, so as to remove the possibility of "rugging" the market. We eventually decided against the plan because of resource constraints, but it remains in the back of our mind.
James Magee joins The ReFi Weekly with Trinity Morphy
Trinity invited ReFi's Mr. Memecoin to discuss memecoins as a fundraising tool for ReFi projects.
ReFi and the Memecoin Mania | CARBON Copy
This edition features James Magee as he discusses the role of memecoins in fundraising for ReFi projects.
The ReFi Weekly happens every Friday. Follow Trinity on X to get notified of future Spaces.
In Other News
Great to see the Bybit validate EthicHub and its regenerative agricultural lending model with US$1 million in funding. EthicHub has already facilitated nearly US$5 million in loans to over 500 farmers in Latin America. The additional funding will only help scale the impact.
Bybit Invests $1M in EthicHub Through Blockchain for Good Alliance to Drive Agricultural Finance for Global Farming Communities
PRNewswire/ -- Bybit, the world's second-largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume, proudly announces a $1 million impact investment in EthicHub,...
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