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Is every memecoin just a scam? Experts on whether Andrew Tate and Trump are fleecing their followers
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 30 May 2025
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politics
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Not all memecoins are scams, some are just memes and are 100% community distributed.
People also usually know what they’re getting with memecoins.
The VC backed shite is far scammier. They actually lie, manipulate the price and dump their tokens for maximum profit.
And Wdym established currencies with their own blockchains? You can mint tokens on solana, cardano and plenty of others.
Exactly. And most of those tokens are shitty, because anyone can make them, and they are not useful for anything. The few that have utility are only useful because they have been declared by their founders to represent some other asset: dollars (like Tether), votes in some governance protocol, even access to the President.
Whereas SOL and ADA can't just be made on demand, by anyone. The native cryptocurrency has some scarcity at least. And utility, but let's face it, their main utility is to create the shitty tokens. (I bought some ADA in the hopes that their smart contracts would be interesting, it turns out all I bought was regret.)
Still, I'd much rather buy SOL or ADA than the craptastic tokens they enable.
Well, SOL and ADA were made on demand, technically ;) That's why proof of work is king. I mean here's the Solana insiders laughing about dumping on retail
https://xcancel.com/GooseOfCrypto/status/1456002541808807938
I dont mind memecoins when they're done right. Transparent, fair distribution, etc. There's also a 'DegenFinance' category of dApps with things that are openly advertised as gambling. One even as a Ponzi (Lock your assets in a smart-contract, pay a fee to unlock, fee goes to the people who stay in longer). Plenty of legit projects building on those platforms too, but yeah unless you're interesting in things like yield, lending, bonds, synthetics, etc - probably not going to ring your bell.
eUTXO is interesting, but Chuck is a hype merchant and people failed to realise how long it'd take to develop everything again from scratch
And thankfully there is a PoW chain that also runs eUTXO, has even more expressive smart contracts, optional privacy built into the core, and a fair launch with no VCs. (Ergo)
Outwith that, Bitcoin Cash is also interesting. They don't have an expressive smart contract language, but have achieved some complex defi with token scripting + off chain. Some cool Lunarpunk projects like DarkFi too although they are private by default so not suitable for mass appeal. But yeah, if Satoshi were still active he'd have forced 90% of the space to call themselves something other than crypto as it's an insult to the original vision.