It would be premature to label all meme coins as “stupid,” as per BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes who believes they can benefit the blockchain networks on which they’re launched. As far as capturing the flow of attention from memes goes, Solana and Ethereum are well positioned, he further added.
As Hayes explained to Real Vision CEO Raoul Pal in an interview on March 30, meme coins bring value to the crypto sector by drumming up interest in the crypto sector and attracting new users and developers to it.
Arthur Hayes on meme coins
“You can poo-poo these things as stupid and valueless, but if it brings attention and more engineers to the space, it’s positive value for the chain itself,” Hayes said. “The chains that can support this culture are going to be the chains that have value,” he added.
He continued by saying that Solana and Ethereum are the best positioned networks to capture the flow of attention generated by memes.
Following the November meme coin frenzy, Solana network activity grew considerably, with many non-meme projects launching on the network in the months that followed. Around the same time, BRC-20 tokens and Ordinals flooded the market causing significant network and development activity on Bitcoin.
According to Pal, meme coins will likely grow in popularity among younger crypto investors taking advantage of the “gaming mentality” present among Gen Z and Millennials. Pal said, “This is the same thing, just gaming with money.”
United States investment firm Franklin Templeton wrote on March 14 that meme coins may offer “quick profits,” but they are vulnerable to risks due to their lack of fundamental “value or utility.”
Ethereum co-founder shows no interest
A March 29 blog post by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin expressed his general disinterest in meme coins. Nevertheless, he asked crypto investors and meme coin developers to find a way to make the tokens useful or charitable, rather than denouncing or virtue signaling to people who trade them.
“I value people’s desire to have fun, and I would rather the crypto space somehow swim with this current rather than against it,” Buterin wrote.
In any case, meme coins have been in the top 10 of the best-performing asset classes within the crypto sector in the last month, according to CoinGecko data.
Compared to layer-1 network tokens which gained 3.4% last week and decentralized finance (DeFi) tokens which gained 4.5%, meme coins listed on CoinGecko gained an aggregate of 13.2%.
