As memecoin mania deepens, more established crypto players are beginning to address the proliferation of tokens being moved around at night.
Popular cryptocurrency blogger Polynya published a blog post denouncing the “broken moral compass” of cryptocurrencies.
“At this point, this evil in cryptocurrencies is considered normal and normalized. This has become the identity of cryptocurrencies – some useful things, sure, but mostly full of scams and absolute decadence,” they said, expressing their own disdain for the racist and sexist memes that have emerged over the two weeks. The last two.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has commented on the issue, acknowledging the unsavory side of memcoin culture, but appreciating people's “desire to have fun” and believing memcoins can be a vehicle for good.
He points to coins that focus on charity and “Robin Hood games” like Axie Infinity that benefit financially lower-income players as examples.
Read more: Cheat Sheet: Vitalik Buterin says there is nothing “new and interesting” about memecoins
Li Jin, General Partner of Variant Fund, made the business case for memcoins, saying that viral tokens represent an effective go-to-market strategy for founders.
“Whereas traditional GTM consisted of first building a product, then building a community around it through marketing and memes, this new playbook involves identifying a vibrant community of users around a memecoin, and then building a product incorporating that token,” Jin wrote, citing The Telegram trading tool incubated by BONK BONKbot is one example.
Read more: BONKbot volumes rise as memecoin's DeFi uses grow
At the BUIDL conference in Seoul this week, a panel of cryptocurrency community leaders discussed whether Solana, a blockchain where many memcoins are traded, should try to filter out racist memcoins, CoinDesk reported.
Stress testing “BlobScriptions” for new blobs in Ethereum
Core fees on blobs, which are packets of data introduced through Ethereum's recent Dencun upgrade, rose this week as Ethscriptions released a platform for creating inscriptions on Ethereum blobs.
So-called BlobScriptions are similar to Bitcoin arrangements in that they create a low-cost way for users to record random data on the blockchain. Users created a torrent of potential memes and non-fungible tokens in the form of a bubble, sending basic pip fees soaring by trillions of percent.
Read more: Blob base fees rise, Ethereum misses slots as 'BlobScriptions' spread.
BlobScriptions are removed from Ethereum after approximately 18 days, but users are not deterred.
As of Friday afternoon, the cost of including a pip in the next Ethereum block had not decreased. The average point fee was 13.4 gigaways at press time, according to Ultrasound.money, which equates to about $0.45. The gas fee on Ethereum's first layer was 31 gigaways at around the same time, according to Etherscan.
Until BlobScripts became popular, the blob space, which Layer 2 uses to send transaction logs to Ethereum, was effectively free.
One interesting statistic:
- Dogwifhat has overtaken Pepe to become the third-largest memecoin with a market cap of more than $4.1 billion, according to CoinGecko.
Also note:
- A Bored Ape believed to be owned by comedian Kevin Hart was sold for around 13.8 Ether, much less than the 79.5 Ether it was allegedly purchased for in 2022. According to a lawsuit in the same year, Yuga Labs is believed to have gifted Hart and other celebrities. Bored Monkeys as part of an undisclosed promotional effort.
- Degen, a popular memecoin community on Farcaster, built a third-layer chain using Arbitrum and Base.
- A Web3 game based on Blast called Munchables was hit with a $62.5 million exploit, but the developer behind the hack apparently shared the private key to recover the assets.
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