Nick Navis
speaker
139 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Nick Navis’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Basically, some people were running what are known as pump-and-dump schemes.
As Palmer looked around, he thought crypto was turning into kind of a joke. So why not turn it into an actual joke? He described how he came up with the idea in an interview with our daily podcast, The Indicator, back in 2018.
Doge, you may remember, was this super popular internet meme built around the image of a dog, a quizzical-looking Shiba Inu. And it was paired with these kind of grammatically challenged captions like, such wow and much amaze.
For Palmer, Dogecoin was an attempt at convincing the crypto-curious to make more rational investment decisions. But instead, the good people of the internet decided to pull a giant, irreverent yes-and to Palmer's joke coin. They started buying more and more of them. Palmer was surprised, and at first he went along for the ride.
He and a community of fellow crypto jokesters donated their increasingly valuable Dogecoins to charity. And for a while, things were going well.
In the years that followed its creation, Dogecoin ended up spawning dozens of copycat cryptocurrencies, or Dogecoin. copy Doge's, I guess, in this case. But the number of these new meme coins was still limited by the technical expertise someone needed to make one. You needed to be able to essentially copy and tweak Bitcoin's underlying code.
What do you do when you're not digging into the smarmy back corners of the crypto world?
Yes, keep them quarantined. Zeke says that first revolution that helped spawn our meme coin filled moment was a cultural one. The one where Dogecoin helped marry the world of memes to the world of crypto. But the second revolution was a technological leap. It came a few years later with the invention of a brand new blockchain called Ethereum.
And this new Ethereum blockchain helped set off a massive surge in new cryptocurrencies starting around 2017 or so. They were called initial coin offerings or ICOs. And these coins were often framed as useful new technologies, cryptocurrencies that would have some sort of real world utility.
It's Bitcoin for farmers. Yeah.
You can see that same quintessential pattern playing out again here. An era of utopian promises turning into a whirlwind of fraudful deceit.
But then came the third revolution that helps explain how we got to our current meme coin moment. And this one had both a cultural element and a technological one. The cultural part happened around the time of the COVID-19 lockdowns, when a bunch of bored day traders stuck at home started banding together to buy meme stocks. Companies like AMC and GameStop.
This was the marriage of meme culture and the entire stock market.
But as we have learned in the cyclical history of crypto, number that go up must eventually come down. Which is exactly what happened in November of 2022. That's when it was revealed that the founder of crypto exchange FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, had been secretly using billions of dollars of customer funds to make massive risky bets.
Crypto winter, some might call it.
So how do we go from crypto's dark night of the soul to an era teeming with more meme coins than we can keep track of? And who are the winners and losers of this brazen new world? That's coming up after the break. Okay, so at this point, we've seen the same pattern play out over and over in the world of crypto.
There's a rush of utopian promises, followed by a speculative rush of shady investments, followed by a sobering collapse as all the sketchy stuff is revealed.
When crypto exchange FTX collapsed, bringing down the whole crypto market along with it, it was like the ultimate emperor's new clothes moment. Even Sam Bankman-Fried, the person who seemed to be the face of crypto going legit, turned out to have committed fraud to the tune of billions of dollars.
In light of that, some crypto traders stopped believing in any promise of the technology's underlying value. They started to see it as pure, irreverent speculation.
Pump.fun is a bit shadowy, but as far as we can tell, it was created in January of 2024 by three entrepreneurs in their early 20s in London. We reached out to Pump.fun, but they didn't get back to us.
Showing 21–40 of 139 · page 2 of 7
← Previous
Next →