Author: Ray Chan, CoinDesk; Translated by: Tao Zhu, Golden Finance
What could be better than making money while having a laugh with your friends?
Memes are taking over finance. Behind the community forums, ridiculous amounts of money being made in a matter of days, and the sometimes crude humor, something huge and meaningful is happening.
Emojis: More than just JPEGs
On the surface, memes are simply photos and video clips that spread across the internet through text messages, social media timelines, and community forums. It’s easy to dismiss them as potentially more than just a humorous reference. Memes convey subtle but powerful cultural meanings in a digitally native way. A meme that becomes popular within a community or culture often represents that group and its values at a particular moment in time.
Blockchain technology offers the ability to financialize nearly anything digitally native, so it’s only natural that crypto has captured meme culture over the years. However, meme finance isn’t unique to crypto. It brings together powerful online communities in both traditional and Web3 finance. Now, financial gamification, while still in its infancy, is revealing a new path forward.
In TradFi, a fringe Reddit community in 2021 became a pioneer of community-first, anti-institutional, anti-rational finance that is deeply and inextricably tied to the intersection of gamification and humorous meme culture. The r/wallstreetbets community “sticks” to traditional finance, betting on traditional stock markets and reveling in their success through hilarious online posts.
In crypto, memecoins have always played a major role - attracting community-first finance that often spreads through the power of memes and market gamification. Early memecoin iterations like DOGE were followed by use case-specific versions like NFT collections, and now the next generation of low-cost blockchains like Solana are accelerating this process.
This has sparked an ongoing debate: Do memecoins need intrinsic value to succeed, or is enthusiastic community support and engagement enough? When we talk about “value,” do we mean a solid roadmap and utility, or does the real value lie in the vibrant community and the culture they create? Perhaps the true value of memecoins lies in their ability to unite and engage people, rather than following traditional financial metrics.
It's fun to make money with friends
Everything that’s happening, both in traditional and crypto finance, suggests something powerful is emerging. After decades of arcane, convoluted, by-the-book ivory tower financial services, people are moving in the opposite direction. Discovering collective financial power and then applying that power to markets goes hand in hand with technology that connects people around the world every day (think Reddit) and democratizing financial autonomy (crypto). All wrapped up in humorous, meme-based communities and financial gamification that, at the end of the day, is just fun. It seems hard to imagine a world where this kind of community-driven, playful wealth creation does anything but grow.
We can think of the meme-ification and gamification of finance as the result of the convergence of technologies. Until now, the ways we’ve spent our time online have been quite different. Social platforms, financial platforms, educational platforms, gaming platforms, etc. have all been separate from one another — isolated in their own digital silos.
Over the past 20 years, some of these industries have merged with each other. Gaming and social media have become inseparable, with platforms like Twitch specifically targeting the intersection of the two. With the power of cryptocurrency, we are also starting to see finance merge into social media.
There is no doubt that the Asia Pacific region is far ahead of the West in this convergence of technologies. Platforms such as WeChat seamlessly combine commerce, social media, gaming, communications, and more. When all of these technologies merge with each other, what do the once separate ecosystems have in common? Culture. And how does culture spread online? Memes. We may not know what the next product that will satisfy everyone’s needs will be, but there is one thing we can guarantee that everyone needs to be happy, and that is memes.
Cryptocurrency is changing the face of finance, but this is not happening in a technological vacuum. It is being accelerated by memes and the deep economic gamification at the core of blockchain systems. The power of finance no longer lies in the knowledge of esoteric financial principles. It no longer even lies in the relationships built by stoic financial firms. The power of finance lies in community, virality, and deep cultural synchronicity.
Welcome to the age of memes.