As bullish as Uphold CEO Simon McLoughlin is about the long-term prospects for digital assets, he finds the “scammy nature of certain parts” of crypto frustrating.
And for McLoughlin, the memecoin explosion is front and center.
“It's depressing to see that we're now at a point where there are 7,000 new memecoins generated every single day,” he told The Block in a recent interview. This AI-driven memecoin creation … it just devalues the whole segment and takes it down.”
The popular memecoin creation launchpad Pump.fun has made $100 million in cumulative revenue from the more than 1 million memecoins that have been created using the platform since it launched in January. At that rate, on average, more than 4,500 new memecoins have been created each day using the platform. Pump.fun allows people to easily create memecoins on Solana, which is cheaper than many other blockchains.
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Despite McLoughlin’s feelings on the low barrier to entry for creating memecoins, Uphold offers customers a way to invest in the memecoin craze. Dubbed the Meme Basket, through the Uphold app, customers can invest in a “curated selection of popular memecoins” that includes top tokens like DOGE
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“We're incredibly fussy about what we list,” McLoughlin said.
Uphold has about 12 million total users, according to McLoughlin, who took over as CEO in 2022. The trading platform launched in 2015 and now serves customers in more than 14 countries.
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