By David Canellis, Blockworks

Compiled by: Felix, PANews

If you’re a celebrity, participating in the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) is no longer in vogue, Memecoin is in fashion.

BAYC can be said to be the most successful project and is popular among mainstream society. However, as can be seen from the floor price of BAYC, BAYC is outdated.

At the same time, celebrity memecoins have generated a crossover appeal that most cryptocurrencies lack.

The idea that Memecoin has no utility is shortsighted. Memecoins are key components of the blockchain, placeholders for “real” economic activity that could potentially move people from traditional financial ports to blockchain ports. In order for this to work, those ports must be able to handle hundreds of thousands of people simultaneously trading Memecoins with silly names.

At this point, even if some in the crypto community are more sensitive to ridiculous and pointless projects, their opposition to Memecoin may misunderstand some of the most active people in the crypto space today.

Celebrities are meeting crypto: fast DEXs, cheap blockchains, gambling apps, Twitter, Telegram, and Discord.

Without the pearl clutching, it would be hard to find any flaws.

So it’s not like Iggy Azalea or Caitlyn Jenner having their own Memecoin is a shady thing. At least not like Katy Perry’s CrYpTo ClAwS, or Kim Kardashian’s Instagram ad for SafeMoon clone EthereumMAX, or even Randi Zuckerberg’s WAGMI music video.

These stunts feel more like a "how are you, kids" statement than anything Jenner or Team Azalea have done.

While countless memecoins have experienced rapid growth, collapse, and stagnation (the classic “rug pull” development trajectory), Caitlyn Jenner’s Ethereum Memecoin has continued to soar.

Jenner launched on Ethereum just days after Solana went live. JENNER on Solana has just reached a market cap of over $30 million after rising over 1,000%.

It was learned that the Jenner team was deceived by an alleged serial Memecoin manipulator and that Solana’s version of the token should not have been recognized at all. This made Solana tokens (which were rapidly depreciating) unofficially useless.

To help drum up interest in the new token, Jenner has pledged to collect a 3% transaction tax from the Trump campaign if the new Ethereum-based Jenner reaches a $50 million market cap (currently valued at $5.8 million, compared to the original token’s $3.6 million market cap).

Tens of thousands of addresses currently hold celebrity Memecoins. But to be clear, these are not high-market-cap cryptocurrencies. Overall, Memecoin, including Dogecoin and Floki, has a market value of over $52 billion, but accounts for less than 5% of the crypto market (excluding Bitcoin).

Jenner’s two tokens, along with Iggy Azalea’s MOTHER and Andrew Tate’s DADDY, account for less than 1% of the entire Memecoin market.

Memecoin has been criticized by crypto people, and even Vitalik has an opinion on celebrities' involvement in cryptocurrency. In other words, Memecoin makes cryptocurrency look immature and speculative to some extent, thereby reducing the attention and funding of more legitimate and technologically sound projects backed by venture capital institutions.

Current Status of Celebrity Memecoin

For true believers, cryptocurrency means everything from the greatest value transfer in history to solarpunk revolutions and anarcho-capitalist coups.

But cryptocurrency doesn’t make any sense either. It’s unknowable and chaotic, and technology gives it meaning.

While the warm, fuzzy community feeling that comes from trading Memecoins with internet strangers isn’t intellectually plausible, Memecoins do have technical utility: They stress-test blockchains in a way that few other token categories have.

Past NFT games like CryptoKitties showed that Ethereum needs to scale with Layer2s; Ordinals showed that almost any EVM chain can crash due to a sudden explosion, and the Memecoin craze proved that Solana’s transaction routing does need improvement.

Welcome to the world of celebrity crypto-meta. These celebrities may not realize it, but their embrace of the fun of Memecoin launches may actually provide the right impetus for crypto, improving infrastructure in the long run.

Related reading: Most celebrity memes have come to nothing, why is Iggy Azalea's $MOTHER successful?