Kevin Dugan
Appearances
The Journal.
In Crypto’s Darkest Corner, A Suicide Became a Meme Coin
It's a joke. It's an online joke.
The Journal.
In Crypto’s Darkest Corner, A Suicide Became a Meme Coin
Someone created a meme coin that was named after his social media handle. And very quickly, that coin took off.
The Journal.
In Crypto’s Darkest Corner, A Suicide Became a Meme Coin
I think what I've taken from this story is that the meme coin markets have had this role here in extending the grief and the pain around the end of Arnold's life. So what you're seeing here is that someone who met tragedy And now you have this coin created by some other person in the world. And now it's part of a casino, right?
The Journal.
In Crypto’s Darkest Corner, A Suicide Became a Meme Coin
It's something that you can buy and sell and bet on and have as part of your portfolio. I don't know if that is a fluke or if like some people in the crypto world are thinking that this is kind of like how things are going. That this is what the future is going to look like.
The Journal.
In Crypto’s Darkest Corner, A Suicide Became a Meme Coin
That you can take any idea, anything, and then turn it into an asset that you can make money off of. And no one can tell you that you can't. And you can sell it to anyone in the world and you can become a millionaire. I think that's what's sticking with me. There's this ambiguity about the future and about the way that we live our lives and how it can be transmuted into some financial-ish token.
The Journal.
In Crypto’s Darkest Corner, A Suicide Became a Meme Coin
there's already this infrastructure that's available that can just take something, take anything and financialize it. And to me, this felt genuinely new and it felt like it was something much darker than I had ever really seen before. And that was why I wanted to kind of explore this and see what was actually happening.
The Journal.
In Crypto’s Darkest Corner, A Suicide Became a Meme Coin
Arnold's family described him as a goofball, someone who was very generous, someone who, as recently as Valentine's Day, was sending money to family members who needed it.
The Journal.
In Crypto’s Darkest Corner, A Suicide Became a Meme Coin
So it seemed like he had a little bit of a volatile life.
The Journal.
In Crypto’s Darkest Corner, A Suicide Became a Meme Coin
You see him. He's wearing a white T-shirt. He's got gold chains on. And he starts talking to the camera.
The Journal.
In Crypto’s Darkest Corner, A Suicide Became a Meme Coin
He had a bit of a following. I think some of what he was known for was a little bit of his edgy humor. He liked to push buttons. And he would do that sometimes by using a lot of language that could include, you know, racial slurs and things like that. There's one video that went mildly viral in some parts of Twitter where he was spinning around and throwing up. And he was called the 360 puke guy.
The Journal.
In Crypto’s Darkest Corner, A Suicide Became a Meme Coin
So that was the kind of level of humor that he was involved in.
The Journal.
In Crypto’s Darkest Corner, A Suicide Became a Meme Coin
So the first meme coin was Dogecoin, and it started off as a joke. The whole project of Doge was a little bit of like, look, you can create something that has no intrinsic value. And instead of becoming worthless and just being something to laugh about online, it actually accumulated a lot of value because it was just a joke.
The Journal.
In Crypto’s Darkest Corner, A Suicide Became a Meme Coin
And so from there, you start seeing more and more meme coins pop up.
The Journal.
In Crypto’s Darkest Corner, A Suicide Became a Meme Coin
You can see that he's feeling much more anxiety as it's going on. He's like scratching his head.
The Journal.
In Crypto’s Darkest Corner, A Suicide Became a Meme Coin
Let's say there's a joke on Twitter that, you know, there's some viral cartoon or something that's just going around. And you're early. You see it and you think, you know what, I want to make a meme coin out of this. And you go on a site where you can create it really quickly. All of a sudden, all the other people who are kind of in on the joke, they want to get in on it too.
The Journal.
In Crypto’s Darkest Corner, A Suicide Became a Meme Coin
Like one that was created in the last few months is something called Fartcoin.
The Journal.
In Crypto’s Darkest Corner, A Suicide Became a Meme Coin
Okay. So Fartcoin is, it does not extend much beyond Fartcoin.
The Journal.
In Crypto’s Darkest Corner, A Suicide Became a Meme Coin
But it has $565 million market cap, as I'm talking right now.
The Journal.
In Crypto’s Darkest Corner, A Suicide Became a Meme Coin
Right. Look, and this is the level of humor that we're talking about here. But it's worth half a billion dollars. And it's, what is it?
The Journal.
In Crypto’s Darkest Corner, A Suicide Became a Meme Coin
It started in 2024. And essentially what it does is it allows you to create cryptocurrencies, meme coins specifically, about as easily as you could create a blog on Tumblr, right? You just click a button, you add a picture, you put in a name, and it doesn't take much more than that. And all of a sudden, you can start having a...
The Journal.
In Crypto’s Darkest Corner, A Suicide Became a Meme Coin
cryptocurrency based off an internet joke, trading to anybody who wants to buy it.
The Journal.
In Crypto’s Darkest Corner, A Suicide Became a Meme Coin
Then he puts the bullet into the chamber of Smith & Wesson. And he spins the chamber. And he looks at it. And you could see that he's in a lot of distress.
The Journal.
In Crypto’s Darkest Corner, A Suicide Became a Meme Coin
Yes. There were thousands of these coins created. Most of them don't really amount to much. But a lot of times you will see a spike because the joke or the meme itself has, you know, it's grabbing attention. A lot of ways to grab attention is just through, you know, something racist or something extremely objectionable.
The Journal.
In Crypto’s Darkest Corner, A Suicide Became a Meme Coin
On his Twitter, he talked about borrowing money from his family in order to buy Trump's meme coins. And he was hoping to create what he called generational wealth. And it didn't seem like he was doing very well. A lot of what he bought seemed to have lost a lot of value.
The Journal.
In Crypto’s Darkest Corner, A Suicide Became a Meme Coin
Sheriff's office, do you have a emergency or can you hold? Sheriff's office.
The Journal.
In Crypto’s Darkest Corner, A Suicide Became a Meme Coin
It's my daughter's father. She was just coming off of work. She checked her phone, saw his Twitter account, and then saw that the video was still up at that point.
The Journal.
In Crypto’s Darkest Corner, A Suicide Became a Meme Coin
So what we know about Arnold's life at that point was that he was under a lot of stress and a lot of financial stress. The reason why we know this is in part from his publicly available crypto wallet, but we also know from police records.
The Journal.
In Crypto’s Darkest Corner, A Suicide Became a Meme Coin
Those cars were stolen, and the drug dealer was very, very unhappy about this and had threatened to kill him. So we know that this was happening around the time that he did the livestream.
The Journal.
In Crypto’s Darkest Corner, A Suicide Became a Meme Coin
It did fit from a certain angle within the culture of this community, right? Because it was extreme and it was obviously very online. There were people afterwards who were obviously shocked and horrified by this, but there were also a lot of people who, I mean, they were trading it. You know, there are hundreds, hundreds of people who have bought and sold this coin.
The Journal.
In Crypto’s Darkest Corner, A Suicide Became a Meme Coin
And while, again, this is a drop in the bucket, you do get a sense that there are a lot of people out there who just have no compunction one way or another about what this means or what kind of effect this can have on this person's family or just somebody else who might be contemplating the same thing.
The Journal.
In Crypto’s Darkest Corner, A Suicide Became a Meme Coin
Someone said that they had sent a bunch of the meme coins to Arnold's wallet. Another person said that they were creating meme coins in order for the family to make some kind of profit or fund their funeral. But soon after, I had talked to some family members. That did not seem to be the case. They got any kind of money.
The Journal.
In Crypto’s Darkest Corner, A Suicide Became a Meme Coin
The company claims that they do have some filters in place. Again, you were just looking at this. I don't know what those filters exactly are.
The Journal.
In Crypto’s Darkest Corner, A Suicide Became a Meme Coin
The SEC hasn't said anything about Haro's death. To the extent that they've talked about meme coins, they say that they are really closer to collectibles, comparing them to something like baseball cards, and that they're not funding any kind of company. They're fundamentally different from a stock or a bond.
The Journal.
In Crypto’s Darkest Corner, A Suicide Became a Meme Coin
It's pretty squishy. This debate has been going on for years and years and years. But the idea here is that if you are Raising money through a cryptocurrency sale and that money is being used to fund the operations of a company, then that should count as a security, right? When it comes to meme coins, what is this money for?