I’ve never really gotten into memecoins. I absolutely love laughing at memes, but the financialization of them has never really clicked for me. I’ve tried a few times, but it’s just not my thing.

I feel much more comfortable looking at fundamentals and buying things with a longer time horizon. I can’t be checking my phone constantly and making financial decisions on a one hour timeline. That sounds like a recipe for stress, no sleep, and permanently elevated cortisol. Maybe for some people that creates adrenaline or excitement, but not for me.

The closest I ever got to playing in this arena was probably the AI token craze back in 2024, specifically with platforms like Virtuals. I could get interested in those because at least some of the tokens had fundamental elements behind them, even if those fundamentals were still pretty flimsy. That was probably the best I ever did with anything meme adjacent.

When I look at the memecoin trenches, I still find it hard to see much goodness or anything built to last. It feels like the ultimate PvP, zero sum casino game.

And yet, every time I think it can’t possibly continue, it comes roaring back.

So what am I missing?

How long can I keep dismissing it before I’m just flat out wrong? And does it even matter if I’m wrong? I can still choose not to participate, right?

On that note, this post from Threadguy triggered such a visceral reaction in me that it probably says as much about my own bias as it does about the post itself.

The part that really got me was the claim that “memecoins are a foundational part of finance.”

That can’t be true, right?

Right?

Even though I scoffed at first, I’ve been trying to lean more into the uncomfortable parts of investing, in all its forms. I figured it was better to be curious than closed off, so I engaged and got back this response from Threadguy, which was basically an 18 minute brain dump of his thoughts on the topic:

I listened to this while driving. I had a 20 minute trip, so the 18 minute video was pretty much perfect.

As I listened, I kept going back and forth. Shaking my head, nodding along, thinking he was completely wrong, thinking he was sort of brilliant, thinking he was missing a huge part of the picture, then being impressed by how well he could articulate some of it. There were parts I agreed with, parts I didn’t, and parts that had me rethinking my own views.

I didn’t come away convinced, but I definitely moved closer to the middle than I was before.

For those of you reading this, the moment I become a true believer will inevitably mark the top. Memes will immediately stop being cool the second I fully come around. This is financial advice.

Then another domino fell into place.

Last week I was casually scrolling through my X feed when I came across this post below. It literally stopped me in my tracks. I had to read it a couple times because I almost couldn’t believe it was real. You’re telling me we’re pairing tokenized stocks like NVDA with the meme of the day in an LP and it’s actually working?

Here’s the post:

Here’s another post from Osmo pointing out the same phenomenon:

So what’s happening here? Why are stocks paired with memecoins taking off? I don’t really know to be honest, but here’s essentially what’s happening under the hood.

Looking specifically at Long.xyz, a lot of this activity is being built on Uniswap v4, with Doppler handling much of the launch and liquidity setup under the hood.

At a high level:

So these are not just basic memecoin pools with a random stock token attached. The stock token is being used as the actual trading pair, which means all of the speculation around the meme also creates volume and demand around the underlying stock token.

That seems to be the core flywheel Long is tapping into: memes bring the traders, while stock tokens give those traders something more interesting to trade against than ETH, SOL, BTC or a stablecoin.

Also, I went to the Long site just to get a feel for how it works, and my main takeaway was how ridiculously easy it is. I can’t stress that enough. The UI is basically foolproof:

You then pick the memecoin you want to pair with it and voilà, you’re live. The whole process could literally take 30 seconds.

This can create deeper liquidity not only for the core assets like NVDA or SPCX but also for the memes themselves. That allows for larger swaps with less slippage and can create a bit of its own flywheel.

One quick update: this landscape moves ridiculously fast, and it now looks like a site called Pons is dominating the launchpad market on Robinhood Chain. The trenches can change overnight 😂

If you’d asked me 6 - 8 months ago, I probably would’ve said memecoins were pretty much dead and unlikely to ever come back as strong as they had before.

Turns out I would’ve been incredibly wrong. Again.

I’d even been watching Pump.fun continue to put up fairly consistent revenue numbers, but for whatever reason, I almost couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I think there’s a lot of people that fall into this camp.

At this point, though, it’s getting pretty hard to argue that memes aren’t here to stay:

So memes aren’t just still hanging around. They’re actually flourishing.

And you almost can’t talk about memes without bringing it back to Solana. I hadn’t realized just how mature the LP scene had become there until one of my savvier DeFi friends showed me how he uses Meteora DLMM LPs to generate fees and build a bigger SOL position.

He uses Meteora’s bid ask curve and deposits only SOL across an extremely wide downside range, sometimes covering a roughly 90% price drop. His whole strategy is essentially to use memecoin LPs to increase his SOL bag.

At a high level (if I’m understanding it correctly):

So he isn’t waiting for the memecoin to fully recover. He’s betting that a high volume memecoin will dump hard, generate a ton of fees, and eventually produce at least one decent bounce that lets him get back into SOL at a profit.

The goal is always the same: start with SOL, rent it out to the chaos, and hopefully finish with more SOL.

Of course, there’s still a lot of execution risk here. But he opened my eyes to a whole segment of the market that I didn’t realize was taking this so seriously. Apparently, a lot of people are already doing this and actively sharing strategies around it.

Why bring all this up? Because it shows how much more structurally developed meme markets are becoming.

It’s no longer just speculators buying and selling a token. The volatility attracts traders, the trading generates huge fees, and those fees pull in more sophisticated DeFi users who are willing to provide liquidity and temporarily warehouse the risk. That deeper liquidity makes the meme easier to trade, which can attract even more volume.

In other words, memes are becoming better at recruiting different participants for completely different reasons. Some people want the gamble. Others want the fees. But together, they create a much more durable and entrenched market than I think most people realize.

Maybe I’m getting a little too philosophical trying to connect this back to memecoins, but it’s hard to ignore how quickly everything around us is changing.

You have Elon Musk talking about a post scarcity world where capitalism and money itself may eventually stop mattering.

Emad Mostaque, the original founder of Stability AI and now the founder of Intelligent Internet, released a book last year called The Last Economy. In it, he talks about us entering the “Thousand Day Window,” a period where the basic rules of our civilization and economy are being rewritten by what he calls the Intelligence Inversion.

His argument is that we’re moving from a world where intelligence was a scarce form of human labor into one where it becomes almost infinite, low cost capital.

And if intelligence becomes abundant, maybe attention becomes the truly scarce resource, while identity and belonging become even more valuable.

I mention all this because, for most of my investing life, I’ve found it very defensible to look at everything through the lens of fundamentals. Revenue, margins, cash flows, assets. That framework has worked for more than a hundred years.

That doesn’t mean this old framework stops working. But the world is changing quickly enough that it may no longer capture everything the market considers valuable.

So I don’t think I can simply reject something because it doesn’t make sense to me, especially when it clearly makes sense to a large group of other people. And especially at a time when narrative, storytelling, vibes, attention, and community may start to matter even more than they have in the past.

Maybe the mistake is assuming memecoins have no fundamentals. They may just have a completely different set of fundamentals.

For a traditional business, the fundamentals are revenue, margins, assets, and cash flow. For a memecoin, they might be attention, distribution, community strength, cultural relevance, and the ability to keep people emotionally invested.

Attention is distribution. Community can become a moat. Culture can be the product.

There’s also an identity piece to all of this. People don’t only buy memecoins because they expect the price to go up. They buy them because holding one says something about who they are, what group they belong to, what they find funny, or what they believe.

That’s not entirely different from luxury brands, sports teams, collectibles, religion, or political movements. People have always spent money on belonging, identity, and status. Memecoins may just be the internet native and highly financialized version of that same human instinct. We definitely saw some of this play out with NFTs.

It’s very possible my definition of fundamentals has been too narrow. And honestly, I don’t think any of us fully understand yet what the second order effects of this radically changing world will be for investing.

It’s also very possible I’m doing mental gymnastics to over rationalize or make sense of memes, when really they’re just animal spirits in their purest form and any deeper introspection is just midcurving.

I am one of the worst memecoin participants of all time. Thankfully, I haven’t lost much money on them, mainly because I almost never participate. But when I do, you can rest assured that’s probably the top.

That said, well before this latest KOL circle jerk, I’d started coming around to the idea of PUMP.

It’s still a tough one for me. I’m basically morally opposed to the business model and think the platform represents, in some ways, the absolute worst of human nature.

But it’s hard to argue with PUMP’s staying power. To me, PUMP is probably the ultimate picks and shovels play on memecoins. We have a podcast coming out soon with Michael Nadeau of DeFi Report that opened my eyes to it even more. I haven’t bought any yet, but DeFi Dad and I have definitely talked about it.

I think one of the biggest challenges for the Pump.fun team will be keeping up with how quickly this world changes. The whole space is constantly evolving, and staying relevant will mean continuing to adapt and staying on the cutting edge of wherever all of this goes next.

The original question I set out to investigate came from Threadguy’s claim that “memecoins are a foundational part of finance.”

I decided to lower the bar a little and focus on a simpler question: are memes becoming part of finance at all?

Honestly, after writing this piece, I lean much closer to yes than I thought I would.

That doesn’t mean I suddenly think every memecoin has value, or that I’m about to start living in the trenches and making investment decisions on a one hour time horizon. Most of these tokens are still brutal PvP games, and that style of investing probably still isn’t for me.

But it’s getting harder to argue that memes themselves aren’t becoming an important part of finance.

They bring attention. They create distribution. They form communities, generate volume, deepen liquidity, and give people an identity to rally around. We’re now seeing them paired directly with tokenized stocks, used inside sophisticated LP strategies, and turned into one of the largest revenue engines in crypto.

At a certain point, if something consistently moves people, capital, and markets, it’s already part of finance whether I personally like it or not.

The important distinction is that memes becoming part of finance doesn’t automatically make every memecoin a good investment. Those are two completely different conclusions.

I’m still not ready to throw traditional fundamentals out the window. But I’m much more open to the idea that attention, culture, identity, and community can become fundamentals of their own. Or at the very least, they can become powerful enough that ignoring them entirely is its own kind of investing mistake.

So do I think memes are becoming part of finance?

It pains me to write this, but yeah, I do.

I still don’t love the casino. But I can’t pretend the casino isn’t becoming part of the financial system.

DISCLAIMER: Nothing written in The Edge Newsletter or said on The Edge Podcast is a recommendation to buy or sell tokens or securities. This content is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing shared here is financial advice. Any views expressed in our content are solely the opinion of that writer, host, or guest. Always do your own research. DeFi Dad, Nomatic, and guests may have positions in the assets or other matters discussed in this content.