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Author: Admin | 2025-04-28
Rising meme coins they purchased at bargain prices. “[Coin creators] often control a large, opaque chunk of the supply, and influencers are paid to shill coins,” says Toe Bautista, a research analyst at crypto market maker GSR.One thing the traders aren’t worrying about: regulators.“Meme coins generally do not qualify as securities because they lack assurances of future profits,” says Michele Cea, partner at New York–based law firm Cea Legal. “Their value is primarily influenced by speculative trading and public perception rather than promises from developers or promoters of financial returns.” Of course, this doesn’t give meme coin creators or traders an exemption from general legal principles protecting buyers from fraud or misrepresentation. But given President-elect Trump’s crypto-friendly, anti-regulation leanings, increased government scrutiny is unlikely.It would be easy to dismiss meme coin mania as simply a 21st-century version of the Dutch tulip bulb craze of the 1600s. But the fact that droves of young people are serious about these absurd and fleeting digital assets exposes a disturbing reality.“People are finally waking up to the idea that the token is the real product, and the crypto industry is a token-production industry masquerading as a software-production industry,” Murad Mahmudov, a.k.a. “Meme Coin Jesus,” told the audience at TOKEN2049 (crypto’s Davos) in Singapore in September. “It was never about the tech; it was always about the tokens themselves.”If you are crushed under student debt, your entry-level job is under threat from AI, you’re despondent over climate change and the basic dream of owning a home seems unattainable, why not bet it all on meme coins? Mahmudov, who is bespectacled and bearded, with shoulder-length brown hair, hails from Azerbaijan, studied at Princeton and says he did a stint at Goldman Sachs before diving into crypto full-time. He did not respond to repeated requests to be interviewed for this story, but the YouTube recording of his TOKEN2049 speech, “The Meme Coin Supercycle,” has been viewed 172,000 times since it was posted in September.In Mahmudov’s view, assets that don’t generate cash flow or serve as a store of value—all cryptocurrencies except perhaps Bitcoin—were meme coins all along. He says meme coins are a symptom of financial nihilism among young people—a generation facing a world in which traditional paths to prosperity seem increasingly out of reach. If you are crushed under student debt, your entry-level job is under threat from AI, you’re despondent over climate change and the basic dream of owning a home seems unattainable, why not bet it all on meme coins?“The system is really bad. The only way to make money is through [trading meme coins],” says Sacks, the South Carolina–based meme coin trader. “I am a good stock picker, but if I want outsized returns, this is what I have to do. It’s making me more money than anything else, maybe more than my day job.”There’s even a meme coin spoofing the vaunted S&P 500 stock market index devoted to disillusioned would-be investors. It’s called the SPX6900. Here’s an excerpt of its manifesto: “You
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