By
Godfrey Benjamin
April 26th, 2024
The Ethereum co-founder has urged meme coins to build fun crypto games instead of relying on charity donations to improve utility.
The meme coins industry has eclipsed to more than $67 billion in market share led by dog-themed coins and Solana-based projects. With a combined daily average trading volume of about $12 billion, the meme coin industry has grown to a level that threatens utility-based projects.
As a result, discussions on how the meme coin industry can evolve from a speculative concept have escalated among most social media platforms in the recent past.
Buterin on Meme Coins Industry
The rise of the Ethereum-based meme coin Shiba Inu (SHIB) is largely attributed to Vitalik Buterin, who received a huge supply at its inception. Notably, Buterin donated almost half of his SHIB share to the Indian COVID crisis management and burnt the rest. Consequently, Shiba Inu’s price has enjoyed notable global support and thus the ongoing bullish outlook.
However, Buterin in his latest op-ed on meme coins highlighted that meme coins need to continually be innovative to be fun for the community. Additionally, Buterin criticized most of the meme coins for only enriching the insiders and creators and neglecting the community with public donations that are not helpful to them.
“Ideally, the goal is to make a co-created environment that leaves all players happy: money is zero-sum, but fun can be positive sum,” Buterin noted.
Buterin highlighted that 0xPARC and its two crypto games – Dark Forest and FrogCrypto – is a great example of a web3 company that is focused on fun crypto games. As a result, meme coin projects should emulate 0xPARC in focusing on community wellbeing.
Furthermore, the meme coin projects through the respective DAOs have raised billions of dollars, especially through token vesting. However, Buterin pointed out that meme coins are propagating racism as observed through the Solana-based projects.
“We have seen meme coins before, starting from Dogecoin back in 2015, and “dog coins” were a major topic during the 2020-21 season. This time, they are heating up again, but in a way that is making many people feel uneasy because there isn’t anything particularly new and interesting about the meme coins,” Buterin added.
Market Check
The meme coin industry has been described as a global online casino on the blockchain with a high risk-to-reward ratio for all investors. Most layer-one blockchains have been using meme coins to attract more on-chain activity and increase the value of their respective native coins.
For instance, Solana-based meme coins have significantly increased the network’s on-chain activity to the point of congestion. Nonetheless, SOL price has gained significantly to almost retest its all-time high (ATH).
With the notable rise of Bitcoin, more cash inflow is expected to the meme coin industry in this bull market, thus improving the overall crypto liquidity.
