Memecoin ‘retail mania’ could go the way of ICOs and NFTs, say execs

Memecoins have an important role in onboarding people into the crypto, but the bumper returns that have been drawing in new investors might not last, according to crypto executives. 

In an Aug. 13 panel discussion at Canada’s Futurists conference covered by Cointelegraph, Jelena Djuric, CEO of Appchain Noble, said that while the memecoin season is still marching forward, she is skeptical of their longevity in the market.

“Similar to ICOs, similar to NFTs, it’s not going to last forever, and it’s going to be interesting to see what’s next because inevitably, you know, it will end."

As of Aug. 14, CoinGecko lists 1,673 memecoins, with a combined market cap of around $41 billion. 

However, Djuric sees memecoins as just the latest “retail mania” phase for crypto.

WonderFi’s Dean Skurka, Blossom’s Maxwell Nicholson, and Noble’s Jelena Djuric at Canada’s Futurists conference. Source: Cointelegraph

“The original phase, the first phase was obviously ICOs in 2017 this was the first opportunity for retail to make significant returns,” she said.

“You don’t really have that anymore, even though we still have token launches and layer 2s and Cosmos chains launching. You don’t really have those same opportunities for returns.”

The initial coin offering (ICO) boom kicked off in 2017 with an estimated $4.9 billion raised. By 2018, this figure had jumped to $33.4 billion. However, by 2019, it had dropped to just over $370 million.

Djuric says Nonfungible tokens (NFTs) are another example. NFTs saw a massive surge in popularity in 2020, accompanied by sky-high prices.

On Feb. 21, 2021, Digital artist Mike Winkelmann, also known as Beeple, made history when his NFT art “Everydays: The First 5000 Days” sold for over $69 million. Coingecko currently has its price listed as 6.99 Ether ( ETH ), or roughly $19,009. 

NFT market cap hit $320 billion at its peak. As of Aug. 14, its market cap is around $74 billion.  Source: CoinMarketCap

“Memecoins I think, came in the perfect opportunity both when we had, obviously, very low gas fees on Solana, and the Solana chain sort of demonstrated its capacity to facilitate this really high volatility trading,” Djuric said. 

“Then secondly, you had the appetite. You had that kind of latent demand. We’d had a few years since the DeFi summer and the NFT boom, and I think it just came out of the perfect opportunity.”

Crypto platforms should embrace memecoins

Whether memecoins will go the way of ICOs and NFTs isn’t clear at this point. Dean Skurka, president of asset management firm WonderFi , says platforms should embrace them while they are still popular.

“I think there’s a clear trend here where there’s a real social element, a community element, with retail trading in general, certainly with memecoins as well. And I think it’s important for platforms like ours to embrace it,” he said.

Despite starting out as a joke, Pepe, Dogecoin, Shiba Inu have all gained significant market caps. Source: CoinMarketCap

According to Skurka, embracing trends when they appear and facilitating conversations around them presents a good opportunity to onboard more people into the ecosystem and possibly keep them around. 

“Not every memecoin, investment or speculative investment is going to end up in a win, but it really brings people into the ecosystem,” he said.

“From there, it’s about education and sticking around and finding a balance between speculative investments and maybe some more stable investments like Bitcoin, Ethereum and others.”

Related: 98.6% of memecoins on pump.fun fail to even launch

Maxwell Nicholson, co-founder and CEO of digital investment platform Blossom, agreed speculative assets like memecoins attract people to the space and can result in them staying and diversifying their holdings.

Nicholson says the 2022 bear market was a first for many people. They entered the space during the preceding bull run and experienced the market’s volatility for the first time.

“They got really burned. It really taught people the sophistication. We saw a lot of people start to diversify their portfolio,” he said.

“A lot of people really started buying more big blue chips, both in crypto and in the stock market.”

Nicholson says it can be a “good thing for the markets” because if too many people are burned, it turns people off crypto.

“It turns people off to the stock market, and some of them may never return to the market.”

“A lot of these people, they start, rather than betting the whole house on these speculative assets, they set aside a smaller portion of their portfolio, say, you know, five to 20% on the more speculative assets, while they leave the bulk of their portfolio into more long term investments,” he added.

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