memecoins

reframing memecoins from casinos to low-cost, autonomous marketing & advertising campaigns --

I've dismissed memecoins as degenerate gambling, but the success promoting companies and causes on pump.fun, most notably PNUT, makes me wonder whether the killer use case is actually advertising/marketing

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Earlier, Vitalik suggested that a potential path for guiding memecoins away from pure gambling and towards the public good were "charity coins" to raise money for charitable causes or "robinhood games" to direct income towards people in the developing world to play games like axie infinity

However, Vitalik himself noted that there were serious incentive problems: how do memecoins deployers actually ensure money goes to charity, and why would they bother developing games if they could just cash out once the token starts to take off?

summary

What else could memecoins be?

https://t.co/8ZVhwkVwLy

vitalik.eth

But now there's this emerging trend of social/political memecoins on pump․fun. There are tokens raising awareness animal welfare causes: like $PNUT (martyred squirrel) or BINGO (murdered police dog)

There are tokens promoting more explicit political causes, like GOP Token (promoting the Republican Party) or HAKA (promoting Maori Rights)

Most interesting to me there are tokens that are simply promoting companies. Like a token for Phantom, a wallet for Solana (which I mentioned earlier) and Microsoft's TinyTroupe AI library

These are the most interesting to me because they are autonomously promoting companies. If you are Phantom (or Microsoft) you can spend $50 to launch a token on pump.fun, outsource the work of promoting that token to profit-motivated traders, and potentially get the equivalent of millions of dollars of paid advertising.

This taps into to the 1.4 trillion+ advertising market. With existing tools and small amounts of spend companies could completely circumvent surveillance capitalists like Facebook and Google

It's also an opportunity for platforms like Warpcast could pivot from pure memes (like $DEGEN) to culturally/politically relevant tokens that transcend tech/crypto, potentially growing into new audiences (both users and advertisers)

Earlier, Vitalik suggested that a potential path for guiding memecoins away from pure gambling and towards the public good were "charity coins" to raise money for charitable causes or "robinhood games" to direct income towards people in the developing world to play games like axie infinity

However, Vitalik himself noted that there were serious incentive problems: how do memecoins deployers actually ensure money goes to charity, and why would they bother developing games if they could just cash out once the token starts to take off?
https://x.com/VitalikButerin/status/1773636178236895583