Although it started with Dogecoin (DOGE), meme coins have grown significantly over the years and turned into a massive category. Especially with new meme coins in the Solana ecosystem and useless tokens on the Base network, meme coins have reached another dimension in recent years. Many crypto experts believe this poses a threat to the future of crypto.
The Future of Meme Coins
Uphold CEO Simon McLoughlin recently highlighted how dangerous meme coins, especially the new type, are for the future of cryptocurrencies. AI-powered meme coin creation applications allow people to mint their own tokens more easily than creating a Facebook account.
So why is this a problem? As the number of unlimited, meaningless, and worthless assets increases, the intrinsic value of crypto is also being exploited. The creation of 7,000 tokens per day is demoralizing for Simon.
“Seeing that we are at a point where 7,000 new meme coins are produced every day is disheartening. This AI-driven meme coin production devalues the entire sector, dragging it down completely.”
Solana and Meme Coins
In recent months, we have seen how the strong increase in activity on the Solana network positively affected its price. Although network activity has increased, some investors find it difficult to understand that turning the blockchain into a huge dump should not mean anything in the medium and long term. The meme coin creation protocol Pump Fun was launched on the Solana network in January. To date, 1 million tokens have been minted.
While an average of 4,500 meme coins are minted daily, the cheap and fast nature of the Solana network attracted investors who see crypto as a huge casino. We have seen rug pull cases with meme coins reaching 10-20 thousand dollars.
The Uphold CEO says that selected meme coins are listed for this reason, and they are extremely meticulous about it. Assets like FLOKI, PEPE, and BONK are available on the platform.
Elon Musk and Meme Coins
Looking back from today, people miss the days when meme coins were indexed to Elon Musk’s tweets and born from his influence. For example, when Elon Musk shared about Baby Shark, we would see BabyDoge tokens the next day. Or when he named his dog, tokens with the same name were minted. However, compared to today, we saw a relatively better environment because far fewer new tokens were pumped into the markets back then.
As the number of new meme coins increases, we also see new tokens among the biggest ones. DOGS, WIF, and others. The only major meme coin that did not lose weekly was WIF.
