Meme coin madness has taken over crypto, with some suggesting that it is retail-driven, while other industry experts claim it is only crypto-natives playing around.
Meme coin hype has dominated crypto social media recently as more seemingly worthless tokens were pumped over the weekend.
Industry observer “L” told their 46,000 X followers on April 1 that it is “obvious” that the meme coin craze is retail-driven.
“Meme coins are the clear indicator of whether retail is here. It’s obvious to anyone who has been in the trenches that we are in a bull market now.”
There were just 2 billion dollars worth of meme coins in all of 2023, and nowadays, these assets are running to 9 figures in the blink of an eye, they added.
Not All Are Convinced
“Retail is here, they just aren’t interested in the technology and ‘financial revolution’ anymore,” they added.
“Everyone coming back understands crypto is a casino, and memecoins are the best vehicle to facilitate that speculation.”
Not all are convinced, however.
On April 1, Ethereum educator Anthony Sassano said that after being in crypto for the past decade, “I can say with full confidence that this is, by far, the weirdest bull market crypto has ever had.”
The four-year cycle appears to be “dead,” he added before opining that fundamental-based trading just doesn’t seem to work at the moment.
“I won’t really believe that “retail” is here in any meaningful way until we see the entire market going up together – not these isolated “sector-specific” pumps that are very obviously pushed by crypto natives and just involve a hot ball of money rotating around.”
When asked about the meme coin madness, he said it was “almost entirely driven by crypto natives.”
It was also pointed out that most retail trading is done on centralized exchanges, which have not seen wild volumes yet. Moreover, many of these obscure meme coins can only be traded on obscure decentralized exchanges, which is not the realm of the average retail trader.
Meme Coin Market Cap Surge
In a recent interview, BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes said that people should think twice before dismissing meme coins as “stupid” or “valueless.”
“If it [meme coins] brings attention and more engineers to the space, it’s positive value for the chain itself,” he said.
According to CoinGecko, total meme coin market capitalization has surpassed $70 billion with over $7 billion in daily trading volume.
Tokens such as dogwifhat (WIF) have come from nowhere to surge to a $4.4 billion market cap, more than Arbitrum, Immutable, or Cronos.
Dogecoin has almost triple the market cap of Chainlink, and Shiba Inu is double that of Polygon, so it does appear that traditional crypto narratives, projects with utility and a purpose, and fundamentals are out of the window at the moment.