Memecoin mania legacy is ugly.

Crypto bubbles is 95% gambling and wasting resources, but the remaining 5% fuels innovation.

• Most ICO tokens died but Chainlink, Filecoin, Brave browser survived

• DeFi summer yield farming ponzis gave us Aave, Compound, Yearn Finance, Uniswap, etc.

Memecoins?

Mostly value extraction with little real innovation added. 

Think pumpdotfun taking money out of the crypto system - a net negative.

Still, they stress-tested Solana and exposed low-float, high FDV token flaws.

DEXs now rival CEXs in volume and lead in price discovery. CEXs serve mainly for exit liquidity.

Memecoins could teach us about fairer token launches, but cabal pump-and-dumps damaged their reputation.

Most won't remember the memecoin mania fondly.

Like during the ICO and DeFi bubbles, many got wiped out.

But at least those eras brought lasting innovations.

Memecoins, though, will leave a modest legacy.

Every successive mania in the Frenzy phase installed less infra than the prior one

Bitcoin (technically irruption) > Ethereum > ICOs / Solana > DeFi > ???

Suggests we're close to the turning point and going to move into the consumer era

Hopefully you are right.

Speculation, payments, gaming, social media... all goes onchain but memecoins was an onboarding event