Blockchain

The Memecoin Thesis or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Litecoin

Sunny Aggarwal

See original thread on Twitter

All money comes from being a meme. A cult. A religion. Think about the famous “Cross of Gold” speech. Gold was a religion.

Bitcoin is valuable not because of the technology, but because of the cult and religion behind it. It’s a successful meme. It’s #DigitalGold

Check out my clip from a recent Epicenter AMA where I sparred with Brian about the “staying power” of Litecoin:

Litecoin has almost zero technological innovation. But what it does have is a moderately successful meme built around itself: “The Silver to Bitcoin’s Gold”. What does that even mean?? I don’t know! But that catchphrase imbued it with $3.5 BILLION of value!

I think this meme partly works because it’s almost funny in a way, it’s like a self-deprecating humor, where it’s just accepted being #2. Idk its funny to me 🤷‍♂️

The case of XRP is…interesting. They started off by being marketing as a utility token *BY RIPPLE * (come at me bruh). However, I think they soon realized that no bank wanted to use volatile XRP and their utility token pitch wasn’t working.

But they realized they need to pivot to a memecoin. #XRPTheStandard. Is it a good meme? Idk, pretty lame imo. It seems to be working slightly, it raised an #XRParmy. But that may or may not be bots. Idk, time will tell if the XRP meme pivot works. I’m betting against it.

ETH also seems to be undergoing a pivot rn. It started as a utility token. Not from being the gas token (I’m skeptical how much value that actually gives it). But rather from being ICO coin, the coin you needed to buy into ICOs with.

But as the ICO market fell, in order to retain its value, ETH needed/needs to become a memecoin. This seems to be working at least somewhat better than it is for XRP, but it’s yet to be seen how successfully ETH can pull off this pivot.

I’m getting pretty excited about Grin btw. I think it has the right pieces there to be a decent memecoin. It definitely has the right story: anon founder, anon devs, fair start, etc. But unlike Bitcoin, it actually has a non perverse monetary policy!

And Dovey Wan came up with a great meme to go with this non-perverse monetary policy. “Time is Money”. 1 Grin per second. Till the end of time.

#TimeIsMoney

Now I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with being a utility token. Cosmos Atoms and other staking tokens are utility tokens. I just don’t know if they can bootstrap themselves to becoming a SoV coin without being a memecoin (luckily Atoms aren’t trying to be money).

Plain utility tokens give people a rational way to calculate its valuation. But you don’t want to people to be rational! You need them to be irrational! That’s how kickstart the meme and imbue it with value!

Thoughts, stories and ideas.

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