A soft science that examines human experience and culture through the systematic collection, analysis, and contextualization of anecdotes, recognizing subjectivity as a critical lens in the internet age. It posits that data emerges from countless individual stories, and when nuanced effectively, these anecdotes reveal meta-patterns about collective behavior, beliefs, and societal trends.

Ironically enough, much of the regurgitated data on the internet already follows this theoretical term. “Did you see the study that showed ?” Or sayings like “well data supports .” Just as similar as “I read an article that said___” when you both know they only read the headline.

Originally this research paper was going to solely comprise of an personal inquisition into Milady Maker, and more specifically, the ineffable cognitive shift that I can notice when dawning my pseudonymous persona with one.

The first time I experimented with a Milady pfp I made Higher Network. This second time I can feel my expression less restrained in some of my post-human curiosities.

This paper is null and void to the would-be reader that disagrees with digital identity theory. Better put, if you do not believe the digital aesthetic you embody pulls different parts of your personality forward this research paper is not for you.

Why do so many crypto-natives pine for CryptoPunks?

There is an acceptable range of answers, but for this paper, we will acknowledge that it is due to matters of signal, external credibility, internal esteem, and industry values.

To own a CryptoPunk is a differentiator. To be engaged with on the social substrate as a CryptoPunk is a multiplier of some variable in the social equation.

Your threads are more likely to be read. Your opinions more likely to be engaged with, positively or negatively. And if it is clear that you do not own the Punk you wear, then you are disregarded generally speaking.

Why are Milady assets so abundant in memetic proliferation relative to their contemporary market assets?

Consider CryptoPunks, Nouns, Pudgy Penguins, Doodles, and BAYC. The penguins are the closest in viral spread, and even there we can find meaningful nuance.

The main difference between the most proliferate (Milady) and second most proliferate (Penguins) is in the content type:

• Head vs full-body

• Y2k neo-chibi vs cartoon illustration

• Polar counterpart (Remilio Babies) vs child counterpart (Lil Pudgys)

• Avant-garde vs Pop culture

The Milady Maker project is a juggernaut in virality. With obvious anecdotes being the Elon Musk post and Vitalik adornment. These being less proof of superiority in market value, and more an illustration of memetic variance.

These notes are not a theorization on X asset > Y asset. There a millions of metric points proving that other assets (Pudgys) are capable of memetic variance successfully. Higher Network itself holds no mascot yet proliferates to this day.

Instead we return to the origin of this paper. Digital aesthetic and identity expression share causal connections in some undefined quantity. Therefore, question 3 arises -- How has Milady Maker crafted such a media collection that unlocks exploratory arms related to frontier inquisitions?

As someone who has spent 20K hours inquiring into these ecospheres, I have garnered, experimented with, and recored, some insights. It would be exaggeration to claim that I feel to have comprehensively grasped the pareto-level answers however.

Tangentially;

• Why do I feel directionally prideful adorning my CryptoPunk, yet limited in edge pursuing expression and curiosity?

• Why do I feel an exhaustive sensory cap regarding independent aesthetic adornments?

• Why do I feel unrestrained and creatively potent when adorning my Milady?

  • What is the anecthropological insight from creating Higher Network with the stated, and now experiencing a second renaissance of fringe expression?

• How does the digital asset industry naturally fork the soft science of MM and Pudgys to create bottom-up cultural containers of memetic variance?

• Are we dealing with a mascot anomaly due to the medium of memetics?

• Is there an obvious paradox at play here?

• Where do the personality archetypes come into play with digital identity assets?

• What is the TAM for digital identity theory?

things like social mechs, network architecture, & opportunities to market experiment with tech & humanities logic 

an ironic period of mourning due to the integration of the technology in my workflow henceforth. as well as the conviction in the tech stack and lack of desire to extricate from the ecosystem 

at the same time i feel quite confident in the general duration of the coming tenure required to erect things like network societies, horizontally agentic systems of QoL upgrading, and open protocolized app layers w products & services as the main driver.

therefore i have little desire to spend my time in the same manner as before, in the kind of limited station currently afforded. 

instead i’m reminded of the broader curiosity, what i now am calling the great digitalization. 

a digitally native humanity. the future of post-human civilization. where the internet is really an inter-net. 

cryptography and cryptocurrencies i undoubtedly believe have a massive part to play in this. part of why i feel no desire to abandon it.

simultaneously, it feels inauthentic to try and convince myself that there are still large leaps to be taken from my current position. 

my theories are documented, public, and many times over peer-reviewed. those theories have been stress tested in the market, with some validated, and many rejected or refined. 

the applications, protocols, and chains i’ve been fortunate enough to counsel have largely succeeded and are thriving. they no longer grapple with the area of inquisition that i was able to assist in. 

supercycle theory i believe to have played out. and my long term convictions now enter decade long price discovery. 

so the resistance that can be felt internally points toward a desire to avoid leaving a more privileged position on a mountain i’m familiar with summiting, for another rookie position on a new mountain in the greater range of curiosity.

mountains like: 

• ai

• bci

• mr

• biogenetics

• quantum

• robotics

if there’s any meta learning to be taken from the past 5 yrs in crypto, it’s that nearly all these frontier technology fields are wide open for curious minds. barely anything is figured out, and the minority % of high agency & network agreeable individuals are dying to educate and integrate new members. 

the real bottleneck is my own effort. which seems easily rectified. 

what if the whole time we were talking about the supercycle coming we were actually inside of it 

meaning that ico → defi → nft → memecoin was a ‘supercycle’ liquidity event horizon 

essentially a window to do a few things: 

1] validate the fundamental thesis’ cross category 

2] stretch the current consumer and producer appetite & macroeconomic vision 

3] transfer liquidity to asymmetric players in the niche 

4] spark a butterfly effect for tech use cases, market research, etc 

if so, the supercycle would more aptly be metaphorized as a black hole that opened a new economic zone of global scale 

the after effects looking more similar to non-liquid-native industry verticalization & horizontal product & service development

further, it would mean things like: 

1] attrition-like growth industry wide 

2] more frequent less potent attempts to replicate supercycle anomalies 

3] the occasional unicorns

4] open season for non-natives to leverage network effects and earn market share enduringly 

5] open season for natives to foster new network effects and earn market share enduringly 

6] resource gatekeeping 10x

7] novelty factor erodes 

8] utility no longer a narrative but prerequisite

the assumption that normies care about sovereignty, custody, data privacy, or honestly even yield-level financing is quite an assumption 

more likely they care about products, services, and enriching experiences that happen in the digital dimension 

all tied in, the supercycle may have been an asymmetric opportunity for massive wealth distribution based on the fundamentals that will be hidden, and truly not cared about, for those products, services, and experiences 

time will tell.

A mental model worth exploring?

If memes are being defined as units of culture. Then we need measurement consensus for the unit of account. Affording us the delineation of diameter, mass, velocity, etc.

Take apart the following subjects to discern if this model has legs-- think in terms of units:

• Religious symbols, parables, prayers

• Currency gradients, functions, measurement

• Company mission, philosophy, product offering

The cultural units are expansive and significant.

Ask yourself if the Christian cross equates to the same unit amount as Bitcoin's ₿?

It's a nonsensical argument at time of writing. Thus, qualitative culture has some intuitive level of quantitative measurement.

Meaning units of culture is quite representative of that which is seemingly intangible. The transferrable data of cultural epochs - references, sensory information matrices, thought patterns, narratives, etc.

On the web, tokenization brings a quantitative unit of account to these epochs at a rudimentary level. Likely the start of qualitative tech? Where we tangilize the intangible?

Therefore:

• kilobyte → kilomeme

• megabyte → megameme

• gigabyte → gigameme

• terabyte → terameme

Greater digital literacy around resource venture?

With a compounding of digital citizens, concepts, and cultural epochs will increase probability of global intervention/scaling. An early example is Higher.

Pain point in the present is education and internalizing opportunity for verticalization.

• I.e. knowing how much cultural data exists within the concept (meme)

Intuitive reframing of digital conceptualization could lead to greater success rates in:

• choosing concepts for verticalization

• creating organization mechanisms around concepts

• durability in the face of tenured scaling

Crypto as a technology is as foundational as electricity, internet, and artificial intelligence.

The rest is just details. Details related to:

• Currency

• Microeconomics

• Macroeconomics

• Self-Custody

• Peer-to-Peer Contracts

• Digital content and media

• Collective ownership

• Intellectual property rights

• Technocapitalism

• Independent careers

• Small businesses

• Data rights

• Platform interoperability

Crypto is already 10+ years in, making it seem as if we are mature in tenure. But the closer reality is that we are unregulated, lacking standards and ethics, and are rife with bandits in the same matter of the western gold rush.

As such, here are my criticisms of which I do not have solutions:

1. Funding, whether venture, user, program, or infrastructure, is fundamentally reflexive and lacking thoughtfulness. There is a systemic mismanagement of liquidity to the tune of billions that results in counterproductive incentives, collective sabotage, and horrid market precedents.

2. Quantitative thinking is dogmatic with little patience for qualitative models.

3. Polar disciplines (developer x designer) are at odds for TAM-supremacy instead of cooperating for building the best apps, products, and services.

4. Big players rush vertical instead of fostering horizontal. (1)(2)(3)

5. Public discourse rarely escapes platitudes. Our social engagement is foundational for the broader vision, and yet we bicker (illogically) as if we are not on the same macroeconomic team.

6. The majority of our industry members are young and inexperienced. This is a part of life, but we improperly weigh their opinions and dictate product, service, and infrastructure decisions on them.

7. We over-index on extraction as long as we can take fees, while being intellectually dishonest about it.

8. We know that culture, entertainment, media, and games are the next things we need to focus on but do not fund (1), foster (3), or have honest dialogue to figure out scaling (5).

9. We over-index on troll culture as a marketing and advertising mechanism.

10. We under-index on marketing and advertising.

Crypto really is the wild wild web. It attracts all kinds of people in the search for digital gold.

The well-intentioned dreamers are so often bent toward the bandit instead of the inverse. This has led into a moral decay that takes significant effort, time, and attention to rectify. Often justified for the sake of the greater good. Greater goods that we don't fund.

With all our problems however, there is no other industry that is as fun, energetic, and open to the diversity of characters the world has to offer.

Crypto compliments that I cannot take credit for:

1. There is no credentialism. Anyone with internet connection, devices, and a functioning brain can join, grow, and master the field. This affords opportunity to generate wealth, networks, and influence in a tangible and meaningful way.

2. Stablecoins allow poverty stricken citizens to escape currency destitution and arbitrary authoritarianism. Raising the chances of economic evolution worldwide.

3. There is no demographic with as much discipline, interest, skill, and resource variability.

4. There may be no other field with as many genius-level youth.

5. Ideologically you can find your niche in crypto instead of being forced to sublimate.

6. People can make more money in a month than their parents made in a decade.

7. Participating earnestly in the field will likely develop upper-quartile competencies in neighboring fields (economics, ai, product, software, governance, marketing, design, etc).

8. You can control your own money.

9. You can control your own data.

10. You can make and control your own peer-to-peer agreements.

Sticking with the wild wild web model, there is genuinely, and metaphorically, digital gold.

For the same reasons bandits, grifters, scammers, and hackers come in droves, so too do the visionaries, experts, geniuses, and iconoclasts. Crypto, if successful long term will afford:

• Independent careerists with verifiable ownership of their assets and earning funnels.

• Platform interoperability that creates higher standards for user and platform value contracts.

• Stable money regardless of geolocation.

• Macroeconomies for high agency youth to generate wealth and quality of life improvements.

• Talent pools and distribution to foster the next boom of small businesses.

• A more financially literate civilization.

• Checks and balances on over zealous nation states.

After 5 years of obsessive experimentation, engagement, and questioning, I feel confident in the claim that for all the annoying parts of crypto, it has been, and continues to be, well worth the headache.

There are valid conversations on why money should or shouldn't matter, or what is the best market model. These conversations do not deal with the current reality however.

And in our current reality, crypto is directly pointed at fostering a more abundant world.

It’s also an immature philosophy in terms of its tenure and market participants, with the oldest among us in the mid-40s and the youngest among us in the mid-teens. In traditional capitalism things are age-gated, accreditation-gated, network-gated, and capital-gated. In crypto it’s anybody who has access to the internet and ability to earn.

I do not believe this to be an inherently bad thing. It does present new blends of character profiles however. For example, the socialist, or communist demographic, is paired alongside the free-market capitalists, and anarchists. Without a centralized government to dictate majority rights, this create an Interesting tension between allowing people to do whatever they want and trying to enforce behaviors via code.

If we examine memecoins, we see this tension play out anecdotally. Many who speak of the negative effects of such gambling or speculation are generally the same people persuaded to contradict themselves when wealth opportunities become obvious.

This highlights not only the diametrically opposed participants, ideas, and practices that this industry is trying to synthesize, but the conflict this version of technocapitalism creates within individual members internally.

Decentralized finance’s goal is to afford capitalist practices, via self-custody and management, to any individual on the planet with access to the internet. Promising them the option of their own security and viability to ascend socioeconomic ladders regardless of geolocation.

The rub of this reality becomes apparent when you realize that wealth creation is rarely a linear event, nor is it something that is based solely on meritocracy. Massive wealth generative events are often the byproduct of some form of asymmetry, whether information, network, capital, or insight.

It’s commonplace to view finance bros or Wall Street as just participating in the traditional economy when leveraging these asymmetries. Those successful are not viewed as ‘bad people’; at worst they are viewed as ‘nonessential’ (generally).

The insightful defi participant can see the similarities between tradfi and defi. Through this understanding it becomes clear that pejorative remarks on those who speculate, gamble, and take high-risk positions are more philosophical in nature.

For a capitalist or anarchist, generating asymmetric wealth opportunities is simply playing by the same rules in a different sandbox. To a socialist or communist, it requires much more consideration and different choice-sets.

It’s important to remember, that due to decentralized efforts, the public goods, public domain folks that tend to lean more toward the latter, can not wholly avoid building alongside their ideological counterparties.

If you look at Vitalik’s wallet and the persistent pattern of airdropping memecoins to him for exposure, you see a microcosm of what I am trying to articulate.

This reality (vitalik nuking charts and donating the money to public goods) is something born of our version of technocapitalism. In no other system would opposite members of ideologies:

• give a counterparty free money to the tune of millions

• take the free money and use it for their own moral code

All this leads to the point of this paper. Technocapitalism may be less about trad-capitalism/acc and more a hybridization of various nation state ideologies at global scale.

Though the current goal in crypto is largely to enable free market agency, it’s also tied into idealistic notions that are directly opposed to capitalism. For instance, if you were to look at something like nounsDAO or Opepen, or Higher, you see ‘socialist’ networks that incubate ‘capitalist’ behaviors. These examples, which I’ve dubbed hypercultures, allow themselves, and unrelated actors, to speculate and financialize the representations of their value systems (via tokens).

While traditional finance has a less expansive version of this with publicly traded stocks or commodities, the internet and crypto at large accelerate ethic, asset, and community generation with little regulation to guide or obstruct it.

As such, we see novel instantiations of the internet, and expressions of human value systems and moral curiosities that have previously never been seen. Group chats buying coffee shops, or raising $50M in a treasury is new. Art projects allowing anyone in the world to contribute and become a canonical piece of a multimillion dollar brand is new. ‘Subreddits’ airdropping ‘stock shares’ to the tune of millions and funding member startups in weeks' time is new…

The Internet is not a nation, but a universe. This seems a more appropriate articulation of technocapitalism. Although nation-states have figured out varying political structures that fit their populace, they all have to bring them to the internet on-level grounds, intellectually.

It is not only a battle of the best ideal, it is a battle of the newest and most forward-thinking ideal. Less restrained by nation-state bylaws, this version of technocapitalism is enforced via consensus, and like Jack Butcher says often, “consensus is temporary.”

If you had been a reporter covering the electricity industry, you would have been asking people about what kinds of vacuum cleaners were going to be invented. But the big winners were things like refrigeration. The Internet is still at that stage—nobody knows what the big winners will be

In 2025 you'd think we figured out the big winners due to Instagram, Facebook, X, TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat, WeChat, Telegram, and VR computer companies. But have we really?

Do we generally like our social algorithms and understand how they work?

Do we know how to maintain our digital hygiene and teach its literacy externally?

Can we reliably avoid distractions in our hours of screen time?

Can we articulate and reasonably affirm the value propositions of the internet to a meaningful majority of users?

In a more recent interview Jeff Bezos added onto the mental model of electricity and the internet. This time with regard to artificial intelligence. And I'd argue that cryptography should join it.

Expressly, that all three (four) of these inventions are "thin horizontal layers" enabling more than civilization can imagine in their moments of market manifestation.

Something — the inability to envision the possibilities in tech breakthroughs — that seems more feature than bug in human nature.

With all four of our next categories widely regarded with less than favorable esteem. Even though their possibilities-afforded are miraculous.

Technology is not something bound by hardware, STEM degrees, and npm functions. It is not a category we should be writing off because of tech bros.

At its core, technology is a lever for human progress, amplifying what we can achieve with less effort, more precision, and greater scale.

The toothbrush is technology. Less effort, more precision, and greater scale for clean mouths.

As is:

• Fire

• Printing Press

• Concrete

• Ballpoint Pen

• Screws

• GPS

• Zippers

Technology is a lever. As Archimedes famously affirmed, "give me a place to stand, and a lever long enough, and I will move the world."

Whether we're discussing United States dollars, Japanese yen, Bitcoin, or secondary forms of money like stocks and treasury bonds, money is another category our cultures largely misunderstand.

Money is a coordination tool for human effort. Allowing value to be stored, scaled, and transferred outside of individual bartering.

Similar to technology, it amplifies what is possible. Enabling people to trade across time, space, and expertise.

Unlike technology's horizontal layers mentioned earlier, money has a y axis at its inception. Instead of being wealth and progress itself, money's a lever for wealth creation, and medium for human progression.

To reject money because of the wealthy is to reject one's own ability to expand and progress.

I'd argue design operates on the z-axis. As a force multiplier for clarity, function, and experience.

Often dismissed as nonessential or simply for aesthetics, try explaining where design stops in one's life. Can you find a moment in your waking days that is not engaged with these principles?

Design is similar to, if not out right, a technology. Turning a thoughtless and bland existence into a meaning-full and creative one. It takes raw potential into usable, resonant, and efficient, functions and experiences.

Just like technology amplifies effort, and money amplifies value, design amplifies meaning.

What meaning means in this piece:

• Form and function.

• Intents and execution.

• Context and understanding.

While design sits in a more privileged area of human activity, its influence and results garnered are so great, that internalizing the concept as decoration forfeits immense opportunity, and earns unmitigated entropy.

Leaving media. The plural of medium.

We hear "media and news network" and think of shadows holding puppet strings with menacing grins. Concepts like propaganda, mis, or dis, information, the advertising industry, Big Pharma, and wars.

Yet media is just infrastructure for attention. A sophisticated tool surely, but not an inherently evil reality.

From books, radio, podcasts, tv, film, memes, posts, commercials, etc — media is a mechanism for ideas. Allowing influence to travel, scale, and sustain itself well beyond its origin point. Or long past the originators lifespan.

Every movement, brand, ideology, and consumer product is inexorably connected to media distribution.

So keeping with our mental model:

• Technology → effort

• Money → value

• Design → meaning

• Media → perception (reality)

Entertainment is a tricky term in this regard. As many may materially discount it of substance, to later take account of its subversive influence on their culture, and their own, sense making. Which, if left unchecked, will seep into one's opinions, ideas, beliefs, and reality.

Also in 1999, Vint Cerf gave a speech titled The Internet is for Everyone.

In it he minted a term "internaut." A hybridization of space travel and internet exploration. Deeming these first few generations as the genesis of a new human.

With the rise of social media, artificial intelligence, $100,000+ Bitcoin, and generation sixteen of the iPhone, it's surprisingly easy to believe we are eons away from 1999.

You can find people lamenting about the best days behind us. How the world is out of new ideas. Or the future's bleak odds at nearly any meaningful concept.

However, when you consider the four domains mentioned earlier, it doesn't feel like our species has even remotely gotten a grasp on any of them. Not how to best leverage them. Nor how to best understand them.

Our algorithms are reactive.

Our money is hyper-inflationary.

Our design is redundant.

Our media is poisonous.

Ironically enough, this is a bullish piece of writing if one can believe that. We are immature as a species. With so much opportunity ahead.

At universities like South Carolina and Johns Hopkins, there are new fields of study dedicated to digital literacy. How to harness the digital dimension.

The world has one generation of internet kids thus far. It's the volatility that makes it easy to trick ourselves into certain assumptions. With one of the most prevalent among this genesis generation; the matrix.

Now a belief, originally born from pieces of entertainment media, it is a prevailing discussion that our species is trapped in a system designed to control us. With things like technology, money, design, and media as the main axis of enslavement.

This piece does not claim that things are balance, or that we can't improve.

It's an observation that:

1. We don't have as much figured out about the internet as we believe.

2. We aren't as evolved as we believe across many vital pillars of civilization.

3. These pillars of technology, money, design, and media are tools not tyrants.

4. The digital dimension, where these tools are democratized more than ever before, is still uncharted with no best practices.

Speaking generally to the internauts, it feels like we've been given lever, fulcrum, connectivity, and resources to a tune no generation prior has received. Maybe that's a more constructive interpretation of The Matrix?

Mid-to-late Millennials and early Zoomers that grew up with corded home phones, streetlights as the universal time to go inside, and vivid memories of using Yellow Pages.

Those same internet kids have memories of AIM messenger, Yahoo, Chat Roulette, MySpace, Tumblr, Vine, and the death of ethernet cables.

Being at the start of the social web (referred to as web2 in crypto), one could argue this is the first digital generation with regard to references, cultural diversity, and influence.

They are old enough to have analog memories, while simultaneously growing up within social technology.

Often the butt of the joke, they have determined many of the traditions in the digital space. From dunk and troll culture, to vlogging, pepe memes, all the way to national tv advertisements, corporate culture policy changes, and as of recent memory, American elections.

Crypto is theirs as well I’d argue. With Vitalik Buterin turning 30 in 2024, for example.

Created by Foda. An enigmatic internet kid with experience in music, fashion, design, and crypto. Yap is one of the countless SPL tokens, commonly known as memecoins, on Solana’s blockchain.

And just like its contemporaries, Yap was launched on the runaway-breakout application Pump.fun - generally called Pumpfun or Pump.

Unlike its contemporaries however, its founder has most recently placed a piece of merchandise (hat) on a Parisian runway in January 2025 alongside Kidsuper.

Yap is the first memecoin to exit the homey culdesac conversations of crypto (predominantly a fintech industry).

The waves this most recent runway show will have on crypto are minimal I’d imagine. It’s the start of something meaningful however.

Crypto brands focused on more than satire and infrastructure.

Things internet kids, who are becoming the market replacement for Baby Boomers, can get excited about. This is not something to thoughtlessly discount in my opinion.

It doesn't need to make sense, or convince, previous markets. Only the current and future ones.

Millennials and Gen Z are often describe as nihilistic, but absurdist is a more accurate representation.

With a certain level of tongue-in-cheek in most things they do, underneath the irony tends to be beliefs they deeply care about. Memecoins are no different.

On the surface they are:

• created out of thin air

• the most volatile financial asset in history

• often the form factor for aggressively offensive humor

• a breeding ground for theft & scams

• built upon an unregulated & largely unproven tech stack

Dig a little deeper and you can see:

• a platform for financial literacy

• market commentary on nation state economics

• next generation wealth creation vehicles

• experiments in the merging of humanities & technologies industries

Memecoins like Yap, whether it is particularly successful or not, are showing that we’ll likely keep seeing the internet, and its kids, terraform culture and finance at global scales and gamer speeds.

1. Mindless, non-stop asset shilling

2. A directionless approach to positioning and attention

Put more curtly, the “buy this” reply guy or the “no utility” maximalist. 

There’s a significant difference between ideas shared between friends and economic counterparties. Even if those counterparties are more comrade than combatant. 

Markets are dispassionate. Profit, liquid capital, and resources are fundamentally at stake. Meaning life and death hangs in the balance. 

If you feel I’m being dramatic look up the leading cause of death in warfare. It’s starvation; failure in a market’s supply chain.

Marketeers are heavily written off in the western world. With matters of sales, distribution, production, and funding often snickered at. Many times for valid reasons. 

Often times however, we conveniently neglect the farmers we respect are market makers. Or the faithful charities we believe in, as market beneficiaries. 

Markets are human coordination at scale. Or as quoted in The Cluetrain Manifesto, “markets are conversations.”

Continents like Africa, Asia, and South America are some of crypto’s biggest adopters. 

The countries within these continents, that happen to be on the lower end of economic stability, are producing more and more talent. 

Why? Because humans struggle to coordinate if the money is unstable, resources are scarce, and production opportunities are limited. 

Crypto offers them:

• stablecoins for less volatile money

• global connections for more access to resources 

• developing markets for greater production opportunities 

Rather than being limited by the patch of grass your parents decided to raise you, crypto is bringing a peer to peer market to anyone with wifi and ideas. Creating more and more conversations. 

Continents like North America, Europe, and Australia are some of crypto’s biggest market makers. With many members focused on entirely different conversations. 

Enter what we as an industry call The Casino. 

Countless articles, justifiable bad press, and billions of dollars have gone through the casino doors. Where market conversations are heavily focused on the creation of tokens. Or the creation of token launchers. Or the creation of infrastructure for launched tokens.

Quickly: 

• Pumpfun creates a market for launching tokens 

• Coinbase/Uniswap creates a market for launched tokens 

• Superrare/FND creates a market for launching tokens (non-fungible v. fungible)

• Opensea creates a market for launched tokens

This is a legitimate part of crypto’s sales, distribution, production, and funding economy. With all six continents participating, it’s the latter group of continents I would argue carry more of our self-saboteur archetypes. 

As a well versed member of the casino I feel confident in these claims; having spent years in what our industry calls the trenches.

We launch tons of tokens. Write tons of think pieces on them (myself included). Make the boldest declarations about them. All while intrusively shilling them and simultaneously demanding zero entrepreneurial work to be done - for risk of ruining the assets potential success. 

Serving as an accidental steward of a memecoin someone else launched last year, I gleaned many insights on the category at large: 

1. People misunderstand the seize the memes of production and he who controls the memes controls the universe quotes as a result instead of a direction.

2. Memes are defined as ‘units of culture’ but there’s a difference between spreading culture and creating economics around culture.

3. Bitcoin, USD, and Ethereum are memes but they serve specific market functions/conversations.

4. Brands are wrappers for memes to enter a market.

The frenzy of memecoin multiples has led many to believe that it’s just about finding the right meme. Though there are exceptions like Dogecoin that one could say proves this point, I’d argue it is the exception that proves the economic rule.

If stable coins are quite literally pegged to $1USD, then they are our internet dollars. With memecoins representing internet stocks, and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) representing internet collectibles. 

These are new markets. For sales, distribution, production, and funding conversations.

If you think of memecoins as internet stocks, then the truer value proposition is access to investment opportunities that have been gate kept in traditional finance. As well as the issuance of public offerings to the retail investor over corpo-political parties. 

Here is a case study of Nike’s IPO to contextualize it further.

Founded in 1964, Nike remained a private company for 16 years before going public in 1980, during which time all stock appreciation was locked behind credentialed investor gates.

Timeline of Nike’s Stock Accessibility Before IPO:

1. Private Funding (1964-1970s) – Nike’s early capital came from founders, early employees, and venture capitalists, who had exclusive access to its equity while the company was growing.

2. Late-Stage Private Market (Mid-1970s - Late 1970s) – As Nike expanded, private equity firms and accredited investors gained access through insider funding rounds.

3. Pre-IPO Institutional Allocation (1979-1980) – In the final stretch before going public, investment banks and institutional investors were given pre-IPO allocations, ensuring they secured shares at a favorable price.

4. IPO Day (December 1980) – Only after 16 years of private value accrual did Nike’s stock become available to retail investors—often at a premium after insiders had already locked in their upside.

Nike’s IPO was a success, but the public entry point into the stock market was fundamentally different from what early investors experienced. By the time retail investors had the chance to buy in, much of the explosive early growth had already been captured by those with pre-market access.

A thought experiment: 

If you were buying stocks when Nike IPO’d would you invest $10,000 into the swoosh company or in a newly minted brand with no revenue, product, or service - but the meme looked cool? 

The sound pushback on this rhetorical is that we know Nike to be a profitable company when it IPOs. We know nothing of this ‘newly minted brand with a cool looking meme’.

This is our larger point with regard to memecoins. 

The benefit of taking private equity to open markets is that retail investors have opportunities to make multiples long kept away via credentialism.

The cost, is that you are taking massive risks with your money. Just as “founders, early employees, and venture capitalists,” to “private equity firms and accredited investors,” and “investment banks and institutional investors” took on the countless not-Nikes. 

This is where a directionless approach to positioning and attention reveals a “no utility” maximalist likely to self-sabotage. 

As asking your memecoin community to remain unconstrained or lacking in any market function beyond its media virality or undefined potential, is asking the market to sell, distribute, produce, and fund an internet stock that has zero fundamentals. It is by definition nonsensical. 

Just as nonsensical as spamming your stock ticker into unrelated conversations, hoping a greater fool will buy in such size that you could ride off into the sunset. 

Imagine: 

1. Walking up to couples eating at a Turkish restaurant and just repeating “buy $NIKE” to each table.

2. Creating Nike, coming up with the swoosh and “Just Do it,” issuing $NIKE stock within the first week of creating the company, and then insisting on leaving things undefined from there.

We are a young industry, in tenure and participant age. 

As such, this editorial is not a condemnation of characters, but instead an articulation of two seemingly consensus truths about economics. A meme is not a product and a market is not your backyard. 

Meaning, memes like victory for Nike, magic and wonder for Disney, or innovation for Apple, are all legitimate conversation starters and north-stars for today’s macroeconomic hegemonies. But they are not the products themselves - athletic gear, films, media, amusement parks, and technology devices. 

While the intense resonance with these memes, their products, and larger brand movements is a beautiful part of the financial world, no amount of pestering will make the world match one’s favor for them either.

As the old proverb goes, “you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.”