Memecoins: Good or Evil with Ledger & Stephen Cesaro

Are meme coins better or worse than the attempts at legitimacy that scams or accidental frauds have been?

Ledger, that's a question to you.

Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. And today on Bankless, we explore the frontier of meme coins. You can't seem to go anywhere in crypto these days without stepping in a meme coin. Whether you're on Twitter and you're seeing Ds posts about Book of Meme, or you're on Farcaster hearing about DGen, or you're on literally any other chain trying to incubate its own meme coin ecosystem, meme coins have dominated on-chain activity in the last month or so. Is this all the future of finance is good for? Are we destined to discover even more degenerate levels of financial speculation? Is the only thing that we can muster as an industry new types of on-chain PvP in hopes of getting rich? Or is there something to celebrate in meme coins? Are meme coins just a bad name and maybe we should call them culture coins instead? Are they a big F you to the man, to VCs, and a logical reaction to the world of private sales and investor accreditation laws? Is there something to be celebrated in meme coin culture? Most importantly, are meme coins going to be the thing that brings back retail into crypto? So far, things look like they're heading that way. So what's next? Before we answer these questions and talk out who is on the episode today, a message from our friends and sponsors over at today on the show, we have two guests debating the merits and costs of meme coins in crypto. Ledger from the Up Only podcast thinks that meme coins are financial nihilism that creates room for bad actors and grifters. Steven Cesaro from the Alfalfa podcast think that meme coins are something to appreciate and celebrate. I think there's something to both sides of the debate. I think both have valid points and both bring some solid wisdom into the conversation. And ultimately, in my opinion, how meme coins will be remembered will be determined by the types of people who create and shepherd them. Which means I personally don't have very high hopes for the optics and conclusions of meme coin mania. But Bankless Nation, I'll let you draw your own conclusions after listening to Steven and Ledger hash it out here on the podcast today. But first, I'm going to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. Bankless Nation, I'm excited to introduce you to Steven Cesaro from the Alfalfa podcast. For those who aren't familiar with Steven, think of Van Spencer except replace VC with D Gen, and that's about proximate to where Steven is. Uh he's my personal favorite market D Gen commentator. Uh, generally speaking, on the pro meme coin side. Steven, welcome to Bankless.

Thanks for having me, David.

Cheers. And of course, Brian Crosgaard, aka Ledger from Up OnlyFame, also Ledgercast, also his own project, Flip.xyz, and also the only crypto person who lives in the state of Alabama. Ledger, welcome back to Pepis.

Hey, that's not true, actually. There's there's a pretty strong crowd here in Alabama.

Three more.

Uh

I I'm not doxing people.

Three more.

Yeah. There's uh y'all remember Messi from uh he's he's gone he's gone private over the recent over recent years, but he's in he's in Alabama and

um there's several more, but I'm not I won't go any deeper.

All right, guys, we're gonna talk about meme coins today. Um, Ledger, you were putting out some tweets uh the last couple weeks talking about how you just can't can't get on board the meme coin train. I was listening to Steven here on his podcast, Alpha Alpha, talking about like the merits of meme coin. And I kind of want to just like put these two conversations uh together on the same podcast. I've got a little preamble that I want to run with to kind of start this thing out. Um, meme coins in crypto are nothing new. They've been a part of the crypto since they were incepted in Dogecoin in 2013. Uh now in 2024, we have the members of the dog with hat community crowdsourcing $650,000 to put a dog with hat image on the Vegas sphere. Uh in 2014, we had Dogecoin funding the travel of the Jamaican bobsled team to go to Sochi Russia to compete in the Olympic Games with the Dogecoin on the bobsled, of course. Uh, this was a very heartwarming uh story, I would say. The Jamaican two-man bobsled team faced financial hurdles in their quest to go to Sochi Russia, uh, and in which uh they got overwhelming response from $184,000 from Dogecoin supporters in 2014. It was a pretty cool story. Um, the best part of this Dogecoin story, I think, is the story of his founder, Jackson Palmer, who intended to satirize what he saw as the speculative degeneracy in the crypto space. So he abandoned the Dogecoin project, stating that he no longer wants to be associated with cryptocurrencies and having sold all of his doge long before it ascended to what it is known today. So we have a dog-themed crypto coin fundamentally that does nothing unique with a founder that abandoned it and a community that stepped in to support it for the lols, and is now a top 10 crypto asset by market cap $23.3 billion, crazily followed enough by SHIB at a $17 billion market cap. And so this is kind of where I think meme coins as a whole got incepted into the crypto industry with Dogecoin. Dogecoin was the first thing in the crypto world. It's like, hey, we can we can make financial assets that are also jokes. Uh, and also look at it, it's got like over $10, $20 billion market cap. Uh, and so this has spawned many debates about what should we do in this crypto industry with this newfound power that we have, which is the freedom to make financial assets for any reason whatsoever. And so I kind of want to just maybe start this conversation here, not really even talking about pros, cons, not even bringing beginning a debate or anything, but make maybe just bring in your own guys' perspective about like how you see the role of meme coins in the crypto industry. Uh, and then maybe we can go into more aside specific conversations. But uh, Ledger, I think you you've been in the industry longer than all of us. Just kind of start this conversation off for us about your your long arc of relationship with meme coins, speculative coins, shit coins, uh, as it relates to the crypto industry, and kind of just what you've been thinking about them over the arc of time.

Yeah, I I guess that

you know crypto's been an experiment forever, and so you know, the vast majority of coins do begin as some form of experiment.

Um, and sometimes with a degree of pointlessness. However,

um I think when we've seen the most success with coins, there's been quick like community gravitation towards like something slightly larger of an idea. So even if you take the Dogecoin example, like it's this general positivity around like the dog is cute. And then like Jackson kind of codified it by

Abandoning it, like kind of a Satoshi esque moment by going away, it turned it into a truly kind of community driven thing. And I'm not against that. I'm against when you can't establish like any form of justification for existence beyond dumping on others in a PvP environment. And

In 2013 and in 2023 and in 2024, 99 plus percent of these are for the purpose of dumping on others. And, you know, nobody's truly standing behind anything with some form of conviction. I'm not like anti community by any means. I think, you know, the in and people will say like Bitcoin itself is a meme coin. And that's true, but it's got a mission statement and it's got there's an understanding, but it does build, and I've said this forever like big Bitcoin's value is by network effects, prom you know, between the provenance um of time.

And the the network effects. It's not different from a code perspective from Bitcoin Cash or Bitcoin SV or you know whatever big whatever all the like thousands of Bitcoin forks from um the 2010s. Like

it's not different in that way. It's different because of network effects and because of its idea and because of the story of Satoshi and the early believers and the method of governance that it's taken over those years. And those are the things that you need. And yes, you do need to develop them.

Um,

but there's been very little demand by at let's say the customer base, the people that are willing to buy these, to shield these. There's been very little demand for any story, if they think there's any potential for number go up, for them to say, like, let's put it on our timeline. So that's really where my my beef comes from is the very PvP nature and kind of this open nihilism, more than the idea of a meme coin. So I guess that's why I'm the bad guy today.

Stephen, did that stoke any thoughts on you?

Uh yeah, a lot of thoughts. I mean,

I feel like I I used to be like Ledger for sure. Like when I first entered this space, maybe like 11 years ago now, I guess, as like an investor.

You know, I thought my job was to um be really smart, right? And like, oh my God, there's going to be this stuff that will change the world. And if I just think about the stuff that's actually going to change the world and buy it before other people do, then I will enrich myself with my huge, big, uh, beautiful brain.

And then this this cycle, you know, continued um for for one or two more cycles where I kept trying to be like smart and impose my own idea of what I thought was the market should be

on the market and sort of ignoring what the market was was actually telling me. And and and now

here in cycle number four, I guess, like I am really, really, you know, a self admitted trying to hit myself over the head with a frying pan, lower my IQ, you know, like trader. You know, I'm I'm trying to see at what the market is is telling me.

And

make money by by following the market, not saying what the market uh should do. The the market undeniably loves the memes, right? And I and I think Ledger probably wouldn't even disagree with that. I think his uh

his uh the thing he takes exception with is the the nihilism, the fact that there's not something

deeper going on here, I guess. But

I would say that even with like something like Doge.

All the stuff you described about Bitcoin,

it's not really that

different from Doge, right? Like it's not like

Bitcoin has any specific utility

or cash flows, right? It is literally, as you said yourself, an idea, a meme. And then you're you but you're basically like, well, the purpose of this meme is better than

the Doge meme, right? But that's just a very subjective sort of thought.

Now, not not entirely. There's a scarcity element to Bitcoin, which is part of the idea. And so one element is it's a better idea. And the market cap proves it. The capitalist environment proves it. When you look at one market cap versus the other, the forever supply or relatively forever supply of Dogecoin has been a limiter to some degree on Doge Doge's potential to usurp Bitcoin over the last 10 year period, which it it had an opportunity to do so for a decade. That's a long time to be able to make up that network effect. And it couldn't, and that's because Bitcoin's idea was stronger.

I I I would probably make the exact opposite argument, to be honest. I think one of the downsides of the sort of Bitcoin like scarcity thing, I mean I object to to this idea that scarcity just makes something inherently valuable anyway, but like e even assuming it does.

What it does is it creates an incentive for like hoarding. Like people want to buy Bitcoin, bury it in the backyard, give it to their kids, and then not share it with anybody, right? So one of the nice things about having a supply that does inflate a little bit more is that you have distribution. Uh the coin gets into the hands of more people. People want to spend it, use it at use it as money, maybe buy a Tesla with it someday. So I I think there are a lot of positives to getting the coins in in people's hands and the network effects of that um, you know, go towards like a long term

uh value add.

And you just made the exact argument of a Fed inflationist for targeting t two percent inflation or whatever, like some minimal inflation to encourage c uh capital endeavors essentially to beat inflation. And I don't disagree with that, except for

Uh in in in this scenario, like there's not a significant market for Dogecoin or other in like highly inflationary, you know, created assets to create those capitalistic environments, like to create the things on top. Um and I I there are some things that can do that. That's the whole point of the dollar, I guess, to like challenge, you know, challenging people through the inflation of the dollar and for the Fed's targets for how the dollar should work to do the same thing. Like if it if inflation's 2%, figure out a go a way to go earn seven or eight or 10%. Uh go do something with those dollars because if you just hoard them, they'll become inherently less valuable over time. And and Bitcoin and other deflationary hedges are are um they're a counter to that. Now they can be limited by that for sure. Like creating economic uh activity on top of something is good. That's why David and I, for example, like really like the Ethereum network because you're creating economic activity, programmatic activity on top of a blockchain using the truthfulness of the chain.

And in that scenario, thanks to

the way ETH mechanics work, it both burns ETH and creates an environment for economic activity on top of it. So I think you can make those arguments, but like Doge, for example, is not exactly like going, going a route of do something on top. It's just inflating. So you just need more people to buy into the idea to outpace the inflation,

which is fine, but I just don't think it's as powerful as Bitcoin's uh like certainty.

Of 21 million coins, and which does in which does inspire hoarding. And that's why you'll never have just Bitcoin. You need the other side of the equation, right? You need the defl, you know, the not deflationary technically, but like the um known known level of inflation and limited um limited supply of Bitcoin. And then the other side of it is the other stuff. And that's why gambling and coin creation has been so popular for so long. And I'm not, I'm not trying to.

say it's like terrible. I'm just saying

most of it's going to zero. You know, and people need to understand that. Like don't marry your bags, even your with bags.

Most of everything in this space is going to zero, right? Like if it's going to zero is a justification for like why something is generally like a bad idea for you.

to invest in, then this this whole space is gonna fall apart. Right. Like how many how many of the like even even the top 500 altcoins do you want to buy and then go into a coma for 15 years and then wake up with, you know, maybe half of your net worth and like like two?

Yeah, yeah. And and and that's

that's kind of my point. Um

and and that's that's for things that have a pr a productive component or things that don't. Like, but for things that clearly do not, they don't know what they stand for, other than here's a funny thing that I thought of 15 minutes ago.

Why is that not something that's great to stand for, though? Like what what is what is better to stand for than memes? Memes are amazing. Sure, there are some things that are better to stand for than memes, but memes are a pretty good thing. Like the internet freaking loves memes. There's an entire, like three generations now of people on planet Earth who love memes and communicate in memes and and share memes. And like memes are a sense of social currency to them, right? There is value in being the first person to sort of like find and spread a meme, right? You get credit amongst your peers, right? It it's it's

It's it's an obvious like next step that we would sort of financialize that to some degree, because like there is like a market value there, even though it's not a value that the sort of traditional boomer world of finance can sort of put in some sort of box. It's it's a new kind of thing, much like crypto is a new kind of thing, much like Bitcoin was a new kind of thing, and much like Ethereum, especially, was even like a new kind of thing within within crypto. Does that resonate?