What do Moo Deng the pygmy hippo, social media sensation Hawk Tuah, and the President of the United States all have in common? They've all inspired highly valuable, highly volatile memecoins. The memecoin began as a sort of joke cryptocurrency, but it soon became very real.On today's episode of The Sunday Story, we turn to our friends at NPR's Planet Money to help us understand the phenomenon of memecoins. What are they, and how did they go from a one-off joke to a speculative frenzy worth tens of billions of dollars? Who are the winners and losers in this brazen new market?Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
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I'm Aisha Roscoe, and you're listening to the Sunday Story from Up First. So there are some things in this world that I just have a hard time getting my head around. And, you know, I've got to say one of them is cryptocurrency. And the longer it's around, the weirder and more complicated it seems to get. It's all a bit daunting to me.
But for some of my colleagues, explaining new trends in the economy is what they do. A few months ago, Planet Money host Alexi Horowitz-Gazi came across a viral video that clarified something about the explosion of a type of cryptocurrency called meme coins. These are highly valuable and highly volatile tradable currencies that have cropped up on the Internet over the past decade.
And anyone can make one. Here's Alexi talking about the video he saw and the story of one particular meme coin.
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 5% 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?
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