Memes coins -- some raw thoughts and lessons 🍿 1. Meme coins can be a powerful grassroots experiment for bootstrapping attention and aligning communities. 2. But—with a series of high-profile, intentional rugs—the market is hitting a tipping point of exhaustion and pain. 3. This is not a case of builders or well intentioned community trying to create some interesting or meaningful experiment, and failing; This is intentional and calculated execution: using high-profile figures -- no other than the president --leverage cabal influencers, and extracting 150M-200M in 2-3 hours. 4. There’s a BIG -- black and white -- difference between builders, creators and community grinding day and night on an experiment—and sometimes failing; and a cabal launching a memecoin purely as a zero sum extraction: insta launch, money grab and rug. 5. Scale matters. More is different. Bigger is different. When memecoins shift from fun community experiments, to the single dominant use case irresistibly absorbing people, capital, and attention, we should carefully analyze their inputs, outputs, and effects. 6. In other words, memecoins as fun community experiments, memecoins as real-time attention markets, memecoins as simple onboarding for crypto users -- are all cool and fine. Every ecosystem will have them. However, we should seriously worry and question things when the scale and effect of memecoins have crossed a line, becoming aggressively cannibalistic and extractive forces for the industry and ecosystem. When they become massive attention and capital nuking moments, obliterating users and desensitizing markets, they effectively mutate into a virus that not only kills the cycle but sets the industry back years. 7. Don't get me wrong. I am very pro experimentation, and curiously encourage them. There are many new lessons to be learned here. Now, when one experiment has gained the scale to potentially curb or kill industry momentum for years, we should be very careful. 8. Meme coins are simple tools. But at scale, their inherent reflexivity, addictiveness and viral nature, makes them surprisingly powerful -- and also potentially dangerous. 5-10 large-scale extractive rugs, can effectively paralyze and exhaust the crypto ecosystem for a few years. The open secret is that Solana has built a memecoin paradise flywheel. This has been its biggest edge, and perhaps its sole (?) comparative driver for growth. Yet, left unchecked, it may also become its undoing. 9. So, here's a billion dollar question: how do we keep memecoins as cool, constructive, positive sum, experiments, and prevent them from evolving into hyper reflexive, attention sucking, capital sucking, zero sum black holes that kill momentum and ecosystems? Perhaps we should use memetic properties for better use cases? Perhaps we should just embed them at the heart of the strongest networks, for better propagation, better alignment, better value creation? Either way, I feel a great utility revolution is under way. We *can* do better. We *must* do better. It is the only way forward.