Note on Money Stuff: Stocks for the Long Run via Matt Levine

if you are selling meme tokens, you do not have to represent that you own the meme, or have any connection to the meme, or can deliver any economic rights connected to the meme, or anything else. All you are doing is pointing at the meme and saying “look at this meme, see, give me money for pointing at it.” It’s so weird, man.

Anyway the murder of Charlie Kirk has gotten a lot of public attention. From that fact, meme coins follow inevitably. You don’t have to like it but it’s true:

Minutes after Kirk was shot, tokens associated with him started to appear: “Pray For Kirk Coin,” “DEAD KIRK” and “Charlie Kirk’s dog,” among dozens of others. While many of the coins’ creators pitched the tokens as memorials to Kirk or sources of charity for his family, each was fundamentally an attempt to turn Kirk’s death into profit.

Within an hour of the shooting, one Kirk token reached a market capitalization of $16 million. By that evening, creators of Kirk coins had already collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in transaction fees on the Solana blockchain. On X, many crypto traders and influencers chided their fellow “degens”—a half-pejorative, half-affectionate term short for “degenerate gambler”—for making money from Kirk’s death.

Every time I write about memecoins I get this vague sense that people think something else is going on, but I can never tell what. Crypto influencers are chiding memecoin degens for profiting from something that gets a lot of attention? What else would the memecoin degens do?

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FROM:

Matt Levine

Money Stuff: Stocks for the Long Run