Coin World News:
Author: Ray Chan, CoinDesk; Translation: Tao Zhu
Laughing and making money with friends? Is there anything better than that?
Memes are taking over the financial world. Behind the community forums, there is a surge of funny wealth and sometimes vulgar humor in just a few days. Some significant and meaningful things are happening.
Memes: More than just JPEGs
At first glance, memes are just photos and video clips that spread on the internet through text messages, social media timelines, and community forums. People often overlook them, thinking that they may be nothing more than a humorous reference. However, memes convey subtle but powerful cultural significance in a digitally native way. A popular meme in a community or culture often represents the values of that group at a specific moment.
Blockchain technology provides the ability to financialize almost all digitally native things, so it is natural that cryptocurrencies have captured meme culture over the years. However, meme finance is not unique to cryptocurrencies. In traditional finance and Web3 finance, meme finance brings together powerful online communities. Now, while financial gamification is still in its early stages, it is revealing a new path forward.
In TradFi, an edge Reddit community in 2021 became a pioneer of community-first, anti-establishment, and irrational finance, which has a profound and inseparable connection to the intersection of finance with gamified and humorous meme culture. The r/wallstreetbets community “resists” traditional finance, plays in the traditional stock market, and revels in their success through funny online posts.
In cryptocurrencies, memecoins have always played an important role, attracting community-first finance that spreads through the power of memes and market gamification.
After early memecoin iterations (such as DOGE), there have been use-case-specific versions like NFT collections, and now, the next generation of low-cost blockchains (such as Solana) is accelerating this process.
This has sparked an ongoing debate: Does a memecoin need intrinsic value to succeed, or is the support and participation of the community enough?
When we talk about “value,” do we mean solid roadmaps and utility, or does the true value lie in the vibrant community and the culture they create?
Perhaps the true value of memecoins lies in their ability to unite and attract people, rather than following traditional financial metrics.
Making money with friends is fun
Whether in traditional finance or crypto finance, everything that is happening suggests that a powerful force is emerging. After decades of obscure, confusing, and rule-following ivory tower financial services, people are moving in the opposite direction. They are discovering collective financial power and then applying this power to the market, closely related to the technology (such as Reddit) that connects people globally every day and the democratization of financial autonomy (cryptocurrencies). All of this is wrapped in humorous, meme-based communities and financial gamification, ultimately just for fun. It is hard to imagine such a world where this community-driven, fun wealth creation does anything other than grow.
We can see the memeification and gamification of finance as the result of technological convergence.
So far, our ways of spending time online have been quite different. Social platforms, financial platforms, educational platforms, game platforms, etc., have been independent from each other, isolated in their respective digital islands.
In the past 20 years, some of these industries have begun to merge. Gaming and social media have become inseparable, with platforms like Twitch specifically targeting the intersection of the two. With the power of cryptocurrencies, we are also starting to see finance merging with social media.
Undoubtedly, the Asia-Pacific region is far ahead of the West in this technological integration. Platforms like WeChat seamlessly integrate commerce, social media, gaming, communication, etc. When all these technologies converge, what is the common denominator between once independent ecosystems? Culture. How does culture spread on the internet? Memes. We may not know what the next product that meets everyone’s needs will be, but one thing we can be sure of is that everyone needs happiness, and that’s memes.
Cryptocurrencies are changing the face of finance, but this is not happening in a technological vacuum. The deep economic gamification of memes and the core of blockchain systems accelerate this process. The power of finance no longer lies in understanding esoteric financial principles. It doesn’t even rely on relationships built by persistent financial companies. The power of finance lies in the community, viral spread, and deep cultural synchrony.
Welcome to the meme era.
