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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Appearances
Oh, God.
Pump.fun eventually took down the livestream function from its website in response to all of this mayhem. Sort of a classic case of, this is why we can't have nice things.
There was the ill-fated Hoctua coin, which crashed just hours after it launched. And perhaps the most famous or infamous of all the new meme coins was the one launched by President Donald J. Trump.
Because there's this whole ecosystem of crypto influencers on places like Discord, X, TikTok, YouTube.
Zeke says there is one key leader whose opinion seems to be valued above all others in the world of meme coins. A man who has taken the joke so far as to helm a controversial new government entity named after that original Doge meme.
Elon Musk is like the meme coin market mover in chief.
Now, regardless of which kind of meme coin creator we're talking about, the goal on pump.fun is generally the same. Whether you are a 13-year-old boy or a C-list celebrity or a crypto insider, what you want is for your meme coin to blast off. You can think of the site as a kind of massive launchpad, like a giant Cape Canaveral.
But a lot of it is filled with the skeletal remains of meme coins that have failed to launch.
Which means they basically have zero buyers.
But if a coin creator can get enough key opinion leaders on board, they might get some initial price liftoff. Because this whole horde of key opinion followers might hop on the rocket in the hopes that they can hop off before the price collapses.
The hope for the truest meme coin believers is that their coin will somehow manage to reach escape velocity and make it all the way to the financial moon, maybe even Mars, to join the doges and pepe coins of yore.
So just like as in a casino, on Pump.Fun, the house also always wins? Yeah. But if you are somehow coming away from all of this with the impression that meme coin millionaires are being minted all the time, Zeke says that is exactly the fear of missing out that fuels this whole market.
And keep in mind, meme coin trading is a zero-sum game. Every dollar someone makes on a meme coin mathematically has to come at the expense of someone else buying it. Which means that this tiny minority of winners, that 3% of traders, is making their fortunes off the vast majority of meme coin investors.
In your mind, is this all just a giant casino? Like, is this just like an ancient practice of sometimes irrational gambling, like just updated and put onto the blockchain?
In a way, a lot of what's going on here feels like a new twist on the classic pump and dump scheme.
Has anyone made a greater fool coin?
And in fact, when we checked the pump.fun registry, there turned out to be no less than 12 competing greater fool meme coins. Half of them with the ticker sign FOOL. If you want to hear what it's like to have your whole life taken over by the meme coin casino, we have another episode coming out next week.
It's the outrageous tale of how an anonymous street rodent became an internet celebrity, got turned into a political martyr, and eventually was transmuted into a piece of cryptocurrency worth billions of dollars. This episode was produced by Willa Rubin. It was edited by Jess Jang with help from Keith Romer. Fact-checked by Sierra Juarez and engineered by Neil Rauch.
Alex Goldmark is our executive producer. I'm Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi. I'm Nick Nevis. This is NPR. Thanks for listening.
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