My huge thanks to Dimitri De Jonghe and Simon de la Rouviere, whose materials gave me the basis for writing this article.

An image to attract the attention of the reader. [1]

As was at the beginning of the era of the Internet, nobody could predict what innovations new technologies would bring to the world. With blockchain, if someone could imagine that Bitcoin would, probably, become the foundation of the next decentralized financial system, the cascade of ideas that followed it hardly could be forseen by anyone. Sometimes, these new ideas integrate into our lives rather seamlessly. When we hear about such implementations we most often think something like: “oh, nice, that makes sense”. But once in a while there are absolutely beautiful, yet nonsensical and delusional ideas that come straight out of the blue and cause you a little cognitive shock.

Like, for example… Meme Markets

A comprehensive technical price analysis taken from [2].

Wait, what!?

Meme Markets. They are markets, where people can invest their fortunes into a well-diversified portfolio of funny (or not so) pictures with random letters in hopes that they will spread like a mental virus from person to person and, eventually, will reach CNBC or whatever main channel in your country is. Where they will become the ultimate fun of the masses and quickly degrade into obsolescence, maybe even returning back to you from the side, where you expect and dread such an attack the least of all — from your parents or grandma.

But…why?

Cures cancer, walks on the water, and creates cute kitties

Alright, let’s bring in some rationality.

First, on the basis of an article from Simon de la Rouviere “History Is Rhyming: Fitness Functions & Comparing Blockchain Tokens To The Web” [3], we will state the thesis that “ Everything will be tokenized”.

According to Simon, the reality is:

“Blockchain tokens have reduced the cost to tokenize coordination by orders of magnitude, and thus we are likely to see the effective tokenization (and by extension, the introduction of markets) into almost everything.”

And, that, in fact, makes sense. Because what is the cost of tokenizing ANY sort of a thing? You just need to write few lines of code that will issue your token. Imagine the world in one or two years. You will be able to program a simple (or maybe even a fancy one) smart-contract on your mobile, issue any kind of a token and airdrop it to the millions of wallets.

The real problem will be in user aquisition (to build up the network effect) for such token. Because, if you issue your own cryptocurrency — Bobcoins and nobody else uses it, well, you have just created something like tons of other-crypto crap. However, if you are Telegram (also created TONs!) and have 200m users, you have just tried to become an alternative financial system for the world.

But..memes.. Why would anyone do something like this?

Probably you will be amazed, but the world is ripe for the meme tokenization (or shell we say memenization?). Don’t believe me? Watch this:

Dogecoin — was a joke meme-coin at the beginning and now sits at $400 million (at the time of writing) market capitalization, being the 47h largest cryptocurrency. 47th! There are 1500 other “Ethereum killers”, “better Bitcoins” and “IoT futures” and yet, Doge dominates them like a boss.

Had no ICO, still better than yours.

Here I want to emphasize that Dogecoin hasn’t had much development over the years. It also doesn’t have a marketing budget, strategic partners, masternodes, staking mechanism, governance — no one to pump its price. However, the Doge community is growing steadily and has 118.273 shibes at the moment.

You cannot buy this for dollars…

The other example, of course, is Pepe Cash — not so impressive as papa Doge, but a rare Pepe currency has $17m market capitalization and serves as another example of how meme-related coins can find a place at the market.

So, now, when we know that memes can be pretty successfully valued at the market, let’s have a look at the “end users”, who might adopt all that insanity.

The first place I want to share with you has exactly the right name to be in this article. It is a subreddit named “Meme Economy”.