there will be many hot takes on what is going on in crypto land. people love it. people hate it. like everything in today’s world there is no middle. but regardless of how you are observing the memecoin markets (valued now at > $60Billy), you know about it through media-- the tweets, the memes, the namesakes and soon, the Sphere.
2,850
media folks definitely hate this. they also hate that I would dare to call memecoin’s a media business. but that’s exactly what it is. with memecoins, you have a bunch of people coordinating around timely pop culture topics (existing or newly created), building real markets around them, and then socializing the fuck out of them. but unlike traditional media where you create content to drive attention and then try to monetize it, memeland does the opposite-- the signal of a topic worth discussing is dictated through “dollars” and once big enough, holders of these coins create media around them to drive more awareness. this, in return, (hopefully) drives the value of their holdings up. rinse and repeat.
value distributes to the participants, not a central company. this is a media business, just not your traditional media business.
“but how is this media? and this isn’t my culture?!?” if you look at the top memecoins traded in volume over the past 24 hours on Solana, many are topics you know quite well. You have Doland Tremp versus Jeo Boden. This morning, Chadimir Putni jumped into the mix. Doge, the forever internet meme, is now wearing a hat (and it’s mad cute, too). Portnoy is commenting on memecoins someone built around him and his rescue pup, Miss Peaches. This has become an ecosystem of its own far from the comprehension of what mainstream media could cover. but as we know, media loves covering media so it will be accelerating through the trades soon enough.
so yes, this does not look like traditional media. and you may hate it for that. but if the role of media is to entertain and inform, ask yourself this-- “when people are showing you where they are spending their time, attention and money, do you ignore it? or do you lean in?”.
