Now it's often been said “Don’t let your memes be dreams”, and nowhere is that more true than crypto.**

**Memes are pervasive in web3 and crypto culture. They are used anywhere from inside jokes, to full on marketing campaigns.

However behind the laughter, snorted air out of the nose or LOLs on Discord, there is a profound danger that is harmful to crypto: the meme coin.

Now if you are here dear reader, concerned with why and how meme coins are bad for crypto and web3, there is probably a good chance you already know what a meme coin is. However if that is not the case, I shall endeavor to enlighten you.

A meme coin is a crypto token themed around a specific meme or concept. These tokens and their projects typically have no roadmap, use case or utility. They are simply dreamed up, deployed and then marketed aggressively. Things like $PEPE, $DOGE and $SHIBA are prime examples of this.

Typically they will develop armies of users (and bots) around them that constantly bombard and raid Twitter, Telegram, Discord anywhere anyone will listen. Their sole intent in all of this is to continue to foster buyers and listings in an effort to move the price of that token upwards.

And therein lies the biggest problem of these meme coins: they exist only to derive profit. They have grown a cult-like following that promises to find the next 10x meme coin or the project that will moon in the next month.

But money is great isn’t it? How can this be a bad thing? Well….

To begin with, let us continue the prior thought and follow the money. Yes, you will often hear about a meme coin making zillions of dollars for a person. But for every one of those stories, you will then see a thousand other people that lost a lot of money.

Frequently, we will then see people that got into crypto specifically for a specific meme coin that they thought would be their retirement plan, lose their money and leave crypto forever. They will then go on to speak negatively about crypto and the space both IRL and online. This results in a negative perception of web3 that becomes a sticking point for the rest of the world.

The media also tends to latch on to these stories of meme coins and use them as an example of “the ponzi scheme that is crypto”. This tends to further the narrative of crypto as a scam, again giving us a continued PR problem.

All of this detracts from the true vision of crypto: retaking control and access to value.

If our main goal is to bank the unbanked and update the financial system, this positioning that meme coins put us in is terrible. It only serves to align us with the criminals, rug pullers and scammers and slows, if not halts, mass adoption.

So if you truly believe in the core mission of crypto it is your duty to help stop the proliferation and ideation of these meme coins, because at the end of the day if we are all gonna make it, we ALL have to make it.

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