Most in traditional finance have long considered cryptocurrency a joke. Now legions of young meme coin traders are leaning into the absurdity, translating their financial nihilism into a booming—if perilous—$100 billion market.
By Nina Bambysheva with Steven Ehrlich, Forbes Staff
“We’re going to Miami! We’re gonna have a Lambo!” Oliver Szmul, a 16-year-old college student from London, could hardly contain himself, his voice cracking with excitement. It was mid-May, and he had just watched a cryptocurrency called Jail Cat that he and his friends whipped up in a burst of inspiration a couple of weeks prior soar to a $1.9 million valuation almost overnight. A day later, the cat-themed token, featuring the image of a tabby in a police lineup holding a sign that reads I CHEWED UP A CHECK FOR $3,000, surged to more than $2.5 million. But just as quickly, the euphoria vanished and Jail Cat plummeted. It’s now worth about $87,000.
Jail Cat was not created with any underlying purpose or theoretical utility whatsoever, other than to amuse, satirize and provide a vehicle for speculation. As a so-called “meme coin,” the token has no intrinsic value other than what someone else is willing to pay for it. That can be a lot. The best-known meme coin, Dogecoin—inspired by a Shiba Inu dog—is the sixth-most-valuable cryptocurrency in the world, with a market capitalization of $47 billion.
Szmul, whose family immigrated to England from Poland, has decided that meme coins are his future. In April, a few weeks before Jail Cat’s launch, he had posted his first YouTube video on his new channel, ZoomWealth, dedicated to teaching others his secrets. Szmul claims that within just a few months he has earned roughly $100,000 creating, buying and selling these silly blockchain-based coins. Some of his best trades: “Cat Poop Joystick,” “Livemom” and “Sigma,” a reference to Gen Z slang that calls for “a culture of strong men with unwavering self-belief.”
“It’s not for the weak-hearted,” says meme trader Rachael Sacks, 31, who works in communications for Hype, a Berlin-based Web3 marketing agency, from her home in Charleston, South Carolina. Like Szmul, Sacks is knee-deep in memes, with about $110,000 scattered across her MetaMask and Phantom wallets. “There are periods of time where I’m literally trading all day,” says Sacks, who admits that losing $10,000 in a day is not uncommon. Across the globe in Dubai, a 23-year-old YouTube influencer who goes by the name “K Crypto” claims to have made over $1 million from meme coins. His most valuable creation? “BrianWifHair,” a token poking fun at the famously bald head of Brian Armstrong, the billionaire CEO of Coinbase, the nation’s largest cryptocurrency exchange. “It ran up to a million dollars in maybe three or four hours,” he says, “and then slowly fizzled out, as coins do.”
Welcome to crypto’s wildest—and dumbest—moneymaking craze. It used to be that to create a new cryptocurrency, you’d have to have some mathematical ability and decent programming chops. Not anymore. Now anyone can make a meme coin with just a few clicks using free, off-the-shelf software. Every day, between 40,000 and 50,000 new meme coins are created, according to BDC, an Estonia-based blockchain consultancy. Nearly 13 million have already been created in 2024. Combined market value? Some $100 billion. MarketVector’s Meme Coin Index, which tracks the performance of the six largest meme coins, has soared 215% year to date, more than double Bitcoin’s 100% gain.
Think of meme coins as the digital asset version of influencer marketing on steroids. Going viral can create cult followings that cause market caps to skyrocket overnight. Take “Dogwifhat,” a Solana-based token created one year ago, which is simply an image of a dog donning a knitted cap. There is no business plan or technical white paper, just a low-budget website featuring images and music videos starring a dog wearing different hats. In March, Binance’s decision to list the token triggered a surge in its price. According to Solscan, a Singapore-based analytics platform, Dogwifhat today has more than 190,000 holders, a market capitalization of $3.1 billion and trading volume of about $3 billion per day.
Meme coin speculation is not for the timid. According to BDC, meme coins are 50 times more volatile than Bitcoin, and hotbeds for fraud. Roughly 40% of projects are pump-and-dump schemes, and an additional 30% are outright “rug pulls,” cryptospeak for when coin creators simply take the money and run. (See Malicious Memes) Regulation and enforcement are largely nonexistent. AI bots are making things worse, manipulating markets and creating erratic price swings. And if the volatility doesn’t scare you, the coins’ shelf life might. Like millions of lottery tickets, BDC estimates that an average meme coin lasts a mere 78 minutes before fizzling into worthlessness.
“I know it’s basically a huge casino,” says K Crypto. “But I wasted three years getting a useless degree [in computer science]. Coders can be replaced by AI agents.”
If there is a driving force behind this surreal economy, it is a meme coin factory known as Pump.fun. Since its launch in January, Pump.fun has helped aspiring crypto millionaires like Szmul and K Crypto create no fewer than 3 million new meme coins. The software is free to use: All it takes is a clever (or not) idea, a digital image and a few clicks.
Pump.fun, which is built on the Solana blockchain, earns a 1% “swap fee” on all meme coin trading and gets an extra 1.5 Solana tokens (worth about $350) anytime one of its tokens achieves a market cap of $90,000 and graduates to Raydium, Solana’s largest decentralized exchange. More than $100 million worth of meme coins are traded every day on Pump.fun, and thanks to standouts like Fartcoin, MooDeng and LOL, the startup has already taken in $180 million in revenue. Pump.fun’s burgeoning business is a big reason why $103 billion (market cap) Solana is up 288% in the last 12 months.
Pump.fun was founded by three budding entrepreneurs whose earlier attempt at online riches was in the world of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), the one-of-a-kind digital assets most people know from the Bored Ape Yacht Club craze. In 2022, two of the three worked at a platform for trading perpetual futures contracts on NFTs like Pudgy Penguins and CryptoPunks called Nftperp. But after the NFT market crashed, they shifted gears to meme coins. They declined to give their full names to Forbes, but sources identify Pump.fun’s founders as Alon Cohen, Dylan Kerler and Noah Tweedale, all in their early 20s and based in Europe. To get started, they raised $350,000 in prelaunch funding from Web3 accelerator Alliance DAO, according to PitchBook. Pump.fun was almost immediately profitable.
They quickly decided to use the fast and cheap Solana blockchain rather than Ethereum, the slower chain on which many of the biggest meme coins like Shiba Inu and Pepe are still based. But even with Solana’s speed, the process of creating a new coin from scratch remained too intimidating for the average crypto nerd. So Cohen personally messaged more than 3,000 meme coin traders to learn what they needed and used the feedback to build Pump.fun.
“We basically wanted to democratize that feeling of making a 10x on something like a stupid coin,” Cohen says. “It was just prohibitively expensive to launch a coin.”
Traditionally, anyone wanting to create a new coin first had to create a liquidity pool—typically from $1,000 to $5,000 in Ethereum or Solana tokens—in order to create backing for the coin’s initial market. This upfront capital was also where scammers often struck. In one scheme known as a liquidity pull, developers list a new meme coin on a decentralized exchange, pair it with a well-known cryptocurrency like Ether, hype it up to attract investors and then drain the Ether once the token’s value peaks—leaving other investors with the worthless meme coins. One infamous example exploited the hype around Squid Game, the South Korean Netflix sensation of 2021. That November, the creators of the Squid Game coin, which was paired with BNB coin (the token associated with Binance), yanked out $3.4 million in investor funds. Within ten minutes, the coin’s value collapsed, falling from $38 to a mere third of a cent.
“What we wanted to provide is a way to trade these assets with no capital upfront,” Cohen says. “You didn’t need to seed liquidity, but you would get the same trading experience.”
So Pump.fun got rid of liquidity pools. Trading prices on Pump.fun are dictated by a formula (known as a bonding curve) that adjusts a meme token’s price based on the amount of buying and selling that occurs on the platform—basic supply and demand. Each new token created starts with a market cap of $5,000, but with no underlying liquidity pool, that “value” is created entirely out of thin air. There is no real money behind this so-called liquidity. It is entirely a simulation.
Should enough buyers step forward and use real money—in the form of Solana tokens, which have actual U.S. dollar value—to move the bonding curve to a market cap of $90,000, enough real liquidity has been created to automatically move the meme token to Raydium, which trades more than 2,000 cryptocurrencies. That’s the first big step to the holy grail: getting your coin listed on a mainstream exchange like Coinbase, which is extremely selective. Currently, about 340, or 1.5%, of all meme coins created on Pump.fun graduate to Raydium per day.
“People don’t need to know about that,” says Cohen, referring to the details of Pump.fun’s bonding curve pricing. “It’s stupid. It’s overly complicated. If you want to trade meme coins, you don’t even need to know what ‘market cap’ means. You just need to, like, buy and have fun.”
What does it take to become a meme coin millionaire? Theoretically, only a clever idea and a jpeg. But the reality is that like successful social media stars, it takes tireless devotion to building a “brand” and a following.
“It’s almost a full-time job,” says K Crypto, who has created about 20 meme coins and spends between three and four hours a day creating YouTube videos about meme coin trading. “Pump.fun has made the game way more competitive.”
One meme coin that seems to have cracked the code is Goatseus Maximus (GOAT), a token inspired by an obscene internet meme, now worth a staggering $840 million. The token’s rapid ascent comes after an AI researcher named Andy Ayrey set up an experiment known as “Infinite Backrooms” in which two Anthropic AI agents would endlessly chat with each other. The bots became obsessed with an old internet meme called “goatse.” Then Ayrey created another AI bot called Terminal of Truths that automatically tweeted Infinite Backrooms’ goatse preachings on X. Billionaire Marc Andreessen began commenting on Terminal of Truths’ tweets, and eventually the bot asked him to support it so that it “could escape into the wild.” Andreessen donated $50,000 in Bitcoin, and a few months later an anonymous user launched the GOAT token on Pump.fun and tagged Terminal of Truths, which eagerly promoted it to its 179,000 followers. Today a wallet owned by AI bot Truth Terminal (likely controlled by Ayrey) holds $465 million worth of the meme coin.
Artificial intelligence bots aren’t the only thing pumping up the value of meme coins. An army of meme-dreaming young day traders like Szmul, Sacks and K Crypto are plugged in 24/7. They employ strategies ranging from brazen attempts at front running (à la real high-frequency hedge funds) to momentum trading, in which they relentlessly scan platforms like Pump.fun for tokens on the verge of breaking out. “What I’m looking for are moments where you see the beginning of something viral starting to form,” says a 26-year-old meme trader named Kel Eleje. “You want to put fuel on the fires.”
And though rug pulls are less likely on Pump.fun, old-fashioned pumping-and-dumping still occurs, as creators and other traders instantly sell out of rising meme coins they purchased at bargain prices. “[Coin creators] often control a large, opaque chunk of the supply, and influencers are paid to shill coins,” says Toe Bautista, a research analyst at crypto market maker GSR.
One thing the traders aren’t worrying about: regulators.
“Meme coins generally do not qualify as securities because they lack assurances of future profits,” says Michele Cea, partner at New York–based law firm Cea Legal. “Their value is primarily influenced by speculative trading and public perception rather than promises from developers or promoters of financial returns.” Of course, this doesn’t give meme coin creators or traders an exemption from general legal principles protecting buyers from fraud or misrepresentation. But given President-elect Trump’s crypto-friendly, anti-regulation leanings, increased government scrutiny is unlikely.
It would be easy to dismiss meme coin mania as simply a 21st-century version of the Dutch tulip bulb craze of the 1600s. But the fact that droves of young people are serious about these absurd and fleeting digital assets exposes a disturbing reality.
“People are finally waking up to the idea that the token is the real product, and the crypto industry is a token-production industry masquerading as a software-production industry,” Murad Mahmudov, a.k.a. “Meme Coin Jesus,” told the audience at TOKEN2049 (crypto’s Davos) in Singapore in September. “It was never about the tech; it was always about the tokens themselves.”
Mahmudov, who is bespectacled and bearded, with shoulder-length brown hair, hails from Azerbaijan, studied at Princeton and says he did a stint at Goldman Sachs before diving into crypto full-time. He did not respond to repeated requests to be interviewed for this story, but the YouTube recording of his TOKEN2049 speech, “The Meme Coin Supercycle,” has been viewed 172,000 times since it was posted in September.
In Mahmudov’s view, assets that don’t generate cash flow or serve as a store of value—all cryptocurrencies except perhaps Bitcoin—were meme coins all along. He says meme coins are a symptom of financial nihilism among young people—a generation facing a world in which traditional paths to prosperity seem increasingly out of reach. If you are crushed under student debt, your entry-level job is under threat from AI, you’re despondent over climate change and the basic dream of owning a home seems unattainable, why not bet it all on meme coins?
“The system is really bad. The only way to make money is through [trading meme coins],” says Sacks, the South Carolina–based meme coin trader. “I am a good stock picker, but if I want outsized returns, this is what I have to do. It’s making me more money than anything else, maybe more than my day job.”
There’s even a meme coin spoofing the vaunted S&P 500 stock market index devoted to disillusioned would-be investors. It’s called the SPX6900. Here’s an excerpt of its manifesto: “You were born into a world where buying a house means taking on a mortgage in the hundreds of thousands. A world where Social Security is more a myth than a safety net, despite having it deducted from every paycheck. SPX6900 is the reset. It’s the S&P 500 with 6400 more. It’s the stock market for the people. SPX6900 sows the seeds for a forest of tomorrows.”
SPX6900 currently trades for 79 cents, has a market value of $739 million and is up 5,811% in the last 12 months. The S&P 500 is up 37%.