Two tells that make me think someone in crypto is either inexperienced or destined to self-sabotage:

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. 

The market is not your backyard

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.”

Crypto as a market

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. 

Crypto as a mirage 

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. 

A meme is not a product

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. 

He who controls the memes actually has a shit ton of work to do 

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.

The Decentralized Investing Index 

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.

Meme market fit 

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.

Crypto is filled with inexperience and self sabotage 

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.”