Nick Nevis
Appearances
Up First from NPR
Gambling with Memes
Okay, so at this point, we've seen the same pattern play out over and over in the world of crypto. There's a rush of utopian promises, followed by a speculative rush of shady investments, followed by a sobering collapse as all the sketchy stuff is revealed.
Up First from NPR
Gambling with Memes
In the video, you can both see the kid's face and a chart showing the coin's price. Within seconds, the list of people buying the coin starts to stream in, and the little green price line on the chart starts shooting upward. Like a rocket ship trying to reach escape velocity on its way to the moon. At first, the kid seems surprised.
Up First from NPR
Gambling with Memes
When crypto exchange FTX collapsed, bringing down the whole crypto market along with it, it was like the ultimate emperor's new clothes moment. Even Sam Bankman-Fried, the person who seemed to be the face of crypto going legit, turned out to have committed fraud to the tune of billions of dollars.
Up First from NPR
Gambling with Memes
In light of that, some crypto traders stopped believing in any promise of the technology's underlying value. They started to see it as pure, irreverent speculation.
Up First from NPR
Gambling with Memes
Pump.fun is a bit shadowy, but as far as we can tell, it was created in January of 2024 by three entrepreneurs in their early 20s in London. We reached out to Pump.fun, but they didn't get back to us.
Up First from NPR
Gambling with Memes
Pump.fun is a place where the newest juvenile inside jokes of the internet can be transformed almost instantaneously into tradable financial instruments. And so you can see the stream of new coins on the site as the cutting edge of what wannabe meme coin millionaires think might go viral. Irreverent internet culture meets the market? Could anything possibly be more planet money than that?
Up First from NPR
Gambling with Memes
Wait, I'm so confused. But then he gets this kind of devious grin on his face. His cheeks start to get a little flushed. He moves his cursor over to a sell button on the website. And with one click, he cashes out the entirety of his holdings in Gen Z Quan. Some 51 million tokens for a cool $20,000 or so. There's a murmur of surprise from other people watching the live stream.
Up First from NPR
Gambling with Memes
Let's go right to the edge of making a coin and then hover on the edge.
Up First from NPR
Gambling with Memes
Yeah, I mean, our mascot is the squirrel from the T-shirt project.
Up First from NPR
Gambling with Memes
Well, there's either animal spirits or there's PM squirrel coin.
Up First from NPR
Gambling with Memes
Oh, God. We're playing with fire. We could launch a coin that just gets out of our hands.
Up First from NPR
Gambling with Memes
We did not, in fact, launch the Planet Money Squirrel coin. Not today, Satan. But it was a shockingly easy prospect. By filling out a few description details and uploading a copy and pasted image from the internet, you too can be the proud slash terrified parent of a new meme coin. But raising that coin to a monstrously profitable adulthood is not so easy.
Up First from NPR
Gambling with Memes
Now, there are three basic ways people garner attention in this world, and it comes down to how much clout the person might have. For the first group, for the people who are cloutless in Cryptoland, Pump.Fun offered a solution. It had a live stream feature, so a no-name new coin creator could try to build a following by basically carnival barking the merits of their meme coin in real time.
Up First from NPR
Gambling with Memes
Pump.fun eventually took down the livestream function from its website in response to all of this mayhem. Sort of a classic case of, this is why we can't have nice things.
Up First from NPR
Gambling with Memes
There was the ill-fated Hoctua coin, which crashed just hours after it launched. And perhaps the most famous or infamous of all the new meme coins was the one launched by President Donald J. Trump.
Up First from NPR
Gambling with Memes
Because there's this whole ecosystem of crypto influencers on places like Discord, X, TikTok, YouTube.
Up First from NPR
Gambling with Memes
In the chat, a little burst of fire emojis starts popping off. And the price of Gen Z Quant then immediately collapses. The green line on the price chart turns red and takes a nosedive. And for a moment, the kid again seems shocked at what he's been able to do. Holy f***! Holy f***! And then the kid makes it clear. He is not, in fact, so confused. He seems to know exactly what's happening.
Up First from NPR
Gambling with Memes
Zeke says there is one key leader whose opinion seems to be valued above all others in the world of meme coins. A man who has taken the joke so far as to helm a controversial new government entity named after that original Doge meme.
Up First from NPR
Gambling with Memes
Now, regardless of which kind of meme coin creator we're talking about, the goal on Pump.fun is generally the same. Whether you are a 13-year-old boy or a C-list celebrity or a crypto insider, what you want is for your meme coin to blast off. You can think of the site as a kind of massive launchpad, like a giant Cape Canaveral.
Up First from NPR
Gambling with Memes
But a lot of it is filled with the skeletal remains of meme coins that have failed to launch.
Up First from NPR
Gambling with Memes
But if a coin creator can get enough key opinion leaders on board, they might get some initial price liftoff. Because this whole horde of key opinion followers might hop on the rocket in the hopes that they can hop off before the price collapses.
Up First from NPR
Gambling with Memes
The hope for the truest meme coin believers is that their coin will somehow manage to reach escape velocity and make it all the way to the financial moon, maybe even Mars, to join the doges and pepe coins of yore.
Up First from NPR
Gambling with Memes
So just like as in a casino, on Pump.Fun, the house also always wins? Yeah. But if you are somehow coming away from all this with the impression that meme coin millionaires are being minted all the time, Zeke says that is exactly the fear of missing out that fuels this whole market.
Up First from NPR
Gambling with Memes
And keep in mind, meme coin trading is a zero-sum game. Every dollar someone makes on a meme coin mathematically has to come at the expense of someone else buying it. Which means that this tiny minority of winners, that 3% of traders, is making their fortunes off the vast majority of meme coin investors.
Up First from NPR
Gambling with Memes
In your mind, is this all just a giant casino? Is this just an ancient practice of sometimes irrational gambling, just updated and put onto the blockchain?
Up First from NPR
Gambling with Memes
He extends both of his middle fingers to the camera and utters a line that's become kind of infamous in the crypto world. Thanks for the 20 bandos. Thanks for the 20 bandos. Thanks, in other words, for the $20,000 or so that this group of total strangers on the internet had just transferred right into his account.
Up First from NPR
Gambling with Memes
In a way, a lot of what's going on here feels like a new twist on the classic pump-and-dump scheme.
Up First from NPR
Gambling with Memes
And in fact, when we checked the Pump.Fun registry, there turned out to be no less than 12 competing Greater Fool meme coins. Half of them with the ticker sign FOOL.
Up First from NPR
Gambling with Memes
The kid then stands up, starts tugging at his hair, and just takes a moment to revel in what he's pulled off.
Up First from NPR
Gambling with Memes
And I think maybe the most absurd part of all this is that the kid then goes on to pull this exact same move two more times with two other meme coins he created that very same evening, betting over $50,000 in total.
Up First from NPR
Gambling with Memes
And when you take a step back and just think about what's happening here, it's kind of wild, right? We're living in a time where a 13-year-old can create his own cryptocurrency, successfully hawk it to a bunch of strangers on the internet over livestream video, and then rip them off for tens of thousands of dollars. Not once, not twice, but three times in one night.
Up First from NPR
Gambling with Memes
All from the comfort of his own home. And all before bedtime. If someone pulled this move on a market like the New York Stock Exchange, they might have had government regulators knocking on the door. But meme coins are kind of a Wild West. And the thing is, what this one kid did is just a tiny glimpse into this much bigger economic story.
Up First from NPR
Gambling with Memes
Just one example of a transformation rippling across the internet. There are thousands of these meme coins being launched every single day now, involving everyone from literal children to social media sensations like Hoctua or Mudang the pygmy hippo to the president of the United States. It's the kind of thing that makes you wonder, how in the world did we get here?
Up First from NPR
Gambling with Memes
Today on the show, the story of the meme coin casino. How a few technological leaps and cultural shifts helped turn a seedy internet backwater into a giant cryptocurrency gold rush. OK, so in order to tell the story of how we got to this moment where we are constantly awash in new meme coins, we have to begin at the beginning. And in the beginning, of course, there was Bitcoin.
Up First from NPR
Gambling with Memes
But in the years after its launch, there was also this whole wave of often sketchy new Bitcoin copycats. And this is where you start to see this pattern develop that's characterized the world of cryptocurrency ever since. A cycle of grand utopian promises followed by a period of frenzied speculation and outright fraud.
Up First from NPR
Gambling with Memes
The story starts back in 2013 with a guy named Jackson Palmer. Palmer was an Australian product manager at a tech company, and he believed that there was something fundamentally useful about what crypto promised to do. But when he looked around at some of these speculative new cryptocurrencies, he saw that people seemed to be using crypto as a kind of cash grab.
Up First from NPR
Gambling with Memes
Basically, some people were running what are known as pump-and-dump schemes.
Up First from NPR
Gambling with Memes
As Palmer looked around, he thought crypto was turning into kind of a joke. So why not turn it into an actual joke? He described how he came up with the idea in an interview with our daily podcast, The Indicator, back in 2018.
Up First from NPR
Gambling with Memes
Doge, you may remember, was this super popular internet meme built around the image of a dog, a quizzical-looking Shiba Inu. And it was paired with these kind of grammatically challenged captions like, such wow and much amaze.
Up First from NPR
Gambling with Memes
For Palmer, Dogecoin was an attempt at convincing the crypto-curious to make more rational investment decisions. But instead, the good people of the internet decided to pull a giant, irreverent yes-and to Palmer's joke coin. They started buying more and more of them. Palmer was surprised, and at first he went along for the ride.
Up First from NPR
Gambling with Memes
On the night of November 19th, 2024, this baby-faced kid, he looks around 13 years old, used a new online platform to launch a brand new cryptocurrency into the world. We're not using his name because he did all this anonymously.
Up First from NPR
Gambling with Memes
He and a community of fellow crypto jokesters donated their increasingly valuable Dogecoins to charity. And for a while, things were going well.
Up First from NPR
Gambling with Memes
In the years that followed its creation, Dogecoin ended up spawning dozens of copycat cryptocurrencies or copied Doge's, I guess, in this case. But the number of these new meme coins was still limited by the technical expertise someone needed to make one. You needed to be able to essentially copy and tweak Bitcoin's underlying code.
Up First from NPR
Gambling with Memes
What do you do when you're not digging into the smarmy back corners of the crypto world?
Up First from NPR
Gambling with Memes
Yes, keep them quarantined. Zeke says that first revolution that helped spawn our meme coin filled moment was a cultural one. The one where Dogecoin helped marry the world of memes to the world of crypto. But the second revolution was a technological leap. It came a few years later with the invention of a brand new blockchain called Ethereum.
Up First from NPR
Gambling with Memes
The cryptocurrency he created is what's known as a meme coin, which is a kind of joke currency, something that doesn't hold any inherent value besides what other people on the internet are willing to pay for it. The kid named his coin Gen Z Quant. He spent a few hundred dollars to buy up about 5% of the total supply of his new coin. And then he also started live streaming on the platform.
Up First from NPR
Gambling with Memes
And this new Ethereum blockchain helped set off a massive surge in new cryptocurrencies starting around 2017 or so. They were called initial coin offerings or ICOs. And these coins were often framed as useful new technologies, cryptocurrencies that would have some sort of real world utility.
Up First from NPR
Gambling with Memes
You can see that same quintessential pattern playing out again here. An era of utopian promises turning into a whirlwind of fraudful deceit.
Up First from NPR
Gambling with Memes
But then came the third revolution that helps explain how we got to our current meme coin moment. And this one had both a cultural element and a technological one. The cultural part happened around the time of the COVID-19 lockdowns, when a bunch of bored day traders stuck at home started banding together to buy meme stocks. Companies like AMC and GameStop.
Up First from NPR
Gambling with Memes
This was the marriage of meme culture and the entire stock market.
Up First from NPR
Gambling with Memes
Exactly. But as we have learned in the cyclical history of crypto, number that go up must eventually come down. Which is exactly what happened in November of 2022. That's when it was revealed that the founder of crypto exchange FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, had been secretly using billions of dollars of customer funds to make massive risky bets.
Up First from NPR
Gambling with Memes
So how do we go from crypto's dark night of the soul to an era teeming with more meme coins than we can keep track of? And who are the winners and losers of this brazen new world? That's coming up after the break.
Up First from NPR
Gambling with Memes
Somebody else recorded the live stream, which is why in the video you can hear the kid and a couple other voices.