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.
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And when you take a step back and just think about what's happening here, it's kind of wild, right? We're living at a time where a 13-year-old can create his own cryptocurrency, successfully hawk it to a bunch of strangers on the internet over livestream video, and then rip them off for tens of thousands of dollars. Not once, not twice, but three times in one night.
All from the comfort of his own home. And all before bedtime. If someone pulled this move on a market like the New York Stock Exchange, they might have had government regulators knocking on the door. But meme coins are kind of a Wild West. And the thing is, what this one kid did is just a tiny glimpse into this much bigger economic story.
Just one example of a transformation rippling across the internet. There are thousands of these meme coins being launched every single day now, involving everyone from literal children to social media sensations like Hawk Tua or Mudang the pygmy hippo to the president of the United States. It's the kind of thing that makes you wonder, how in the world did we get here?
Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi and I'm joined by freelance reporter Nick Navis.
Today on the show, the story of the meme coin casino. How a few technological leaps and cultural shifts helped turn a seedy internet backwater into a giant cryptocurrency gold rush. Okay, so in order to tell the story of how we got to this moment, where we are constantly awash in new meme coins, we have to begin at the beginning. And in the beginning, of course, there was Bitcoin.
But in the years after its launch, there was also this whole wave of often sketchy new Bitcoin copycats. And this is where you start to see this pattern develop that's characterized the world of cryptocurrency ever since. A cycle of grand utopian promises followed by a period of frenzied speculation and outright fraud.
The story starts back in 2013 with a guy named Jackson Palmer. Palmer was an Australian product manager at a tech company, and he believed that there was something fundamentally useful about what crypto promised to do. But when he looked around at some of these speculative new cryptocurrencies, he saw that people seemed to be using crypto as a kind of cash grab.
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 copied 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.
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