Planet Money: The Memecoin Casino
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Hi, Alexi. Hey, PJ. How are you? I'm good. I'm good. I'm enjoying the very beginning of spring.
Yeah, me too. Although I'm already schvitzing. You're schvitzing already? You're schvitzing in mid-March? I don't know what climb my people evolved around, but I still haven't found it yet.
I'm so sorry to hear that.
Yeah, it's okay.
Everyone should have at least one season they enjoy. It's true. I'm still in search. This is Alexey Horowitz-Gazy. He's a reporter whose work I very much enjoy. He's also one of the hosts at Planet Money. Does that show need an introduction? They're a long-running, very smart NPR show that explains, week by week, the world of things driven by markets. So, just a couple weeks ago, we actually did a story with one of your NPR colleagues, Bobby Allen, that was about Doge, the government commission. Yes, the legend. The legend. Today, we're doing a story with you that actually, weirdly, a little bit is like almost lore or backstory to Doge. Like, it's in part about Doge the meme coin.
Yeah, it's like about the other branch of the internet butterfly effect of the Doge meme. Who would have thought that that would be the meme that has far-reaching legs into American culture? I know. That changed world history? I didn't expect it.
Yeah, it's funny. I mean, Planet Money, your show, which when we were beginning to pilot Search Engine, we talked a lot about Planet Money and how at its genesis, we were like in the mortgage crisis and everybody was looking for explanation. And Planet Money kind of like arose to make sense of something that needed sense making. I feel like... We are now entering, once again, a moment in which the economy is both confusing and somewhat terrifying. And it's like, I'm very glad PlanetMoney is here.
I'm so glad that we're still managing to explain the bewildering moment, even if it's as silly as meme coins. Yeah. It feels like it's becoming more and more impossible to avoid, even if you want to. This whole question behind crypto the whole time is whether or not there's actual utility to it, whether or not it's actually a kind of utopian world building project, or it's just a kind of nihilistic, irreverent cesspool. And I feel like this moment with meme coins is really like getting to the heart of that question.
I really had not understood how much meme coins had evolved since I was last seriously covering crypto. But that world has gotten much stranger and wilder, even compared to just 2022, for a very specific reason. This is a story about why that happened. I first heard it on Planet Money, but I liked it so much, I wanted to share it with you here. I'm going to let Alexi take it away.
On the night of November 19th, 2024, this baby-faced kid, he looks around 13 years old, used a new online platform to launch a brand new cryptocurrency into the world. We're not using his name because he did all this anonymously. The cryptocurrency he created is what's known as a meme coin, which is a kind of joke currency, something that doesn't hold any inherent value besides what other people on the internet are willing to pay for it. The kid named his coin Gen Z Quant. He spent a few hundred dollars to buy up about five percent of the total supply of his new coin. And then he also started live streaming on the platform. Somebody else recorded the live stream, which is why in the video you can hear the kid and a couple other voices.
Are we bonded yet, or what's good?
In the video, you can both see the kid's face and a chart showing the coin's price. Within seconds, the list of people buying the coin starts to stream in, and the little green price line on the chart starts shooting upward. Like a rocket ship trying to reach escape velocity on its way to the moon. At first, the kid seems surprised.
Wait, what?
Wait, I'm so confused. But then he gets this kind of devious grin on his face. His cheeks start to get a little flushed. He moves his cursor over to a sell button on the website. And with one click, he cashes out the entirety of his holdings in Gen Z Quan. Some 51 million tokens for a cool $20,000 or so. There's a murmur of surprise from other people watching the live stream.
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