What else can MEME coin do?

Ten years ago, two weeks before the public launch of Ethereum, I published this article in Bitcoin Magazine arguing that issuing tokens could be a new way to finance important public projects. The thinking at the time was this: society needs to finance large, worthwhile projects, and markets and institutions (including corporations and governments) are the main means we have today, both of which work in some cases and fail in others. Issuing new tokens seemed like a third large-scale financing technology that seemed different enough from both markets and institutions to succeed and fail in different areas — so it could fill some important gaps.

People who care about cancer research can hold, accept, and trade AntiCancerCoin; people who care about the environment will hold and use ClimateCoin, etc. The tokens people choose to use will determine which causes get funded.

Today, in 2024, one of the main topics of discussion in the “cryptosphere” seems to be memecoins. We’ve seen memecoins before, dating back to Dogecoin in 2015, and Dogecoin was also a major topic during the 2020-21 season. They’ve been heating up again during this time, but in a way that makes many people uneasy, because there’s nothing particularly new or interesting about these memecoins. In fact, it’s often quite the opposite: recently, some Solana memecoins were publicly exposed as being super racist. Even non-racist memecoins often seem to just fluctuate in price up and down, without contributing any value after the fact.

People are frustrated:

Even long-time Ethereum philosopher Polynya is very, very unhappy:

One answer to this conundrum is to shake our heads and virtue signal how disgusted and opposed we are to this silliness. In a way, this is the right thing to do. But at the same time, we can also ask another question: if people value fun, and financialized games seem to provide that at least sometimes, is there a more corrected version of the whole concept?

Charity Coins

The most interesting coins I’ve seen are the ones where a large portion of the token supply (or some ongoing fee mechanism) is dedicated to some kind of charity. A year and a half ago, there was a token called “GiveWell Inu” (no longer active) that donated proceeds to GiveWell. In the last two years, there has been a coin called “Dragon Fable” that supports cultural projects related to anti-aging research, among other causes. Unfortunately, both are far from perfect: GiveWell Inu no longer appears to be maintained, and the other has some very annoying core community members who constantly pester me for attention, which makes me reluctant to mention them more than once at this point. More successfully, after I acquired half of the Dogelon Mars token supply, the Methuselah Foundation, the two Methuselah Foundations, and the Dogelon Mars community seem to have developed a positive-sum relationship with each other, retroactively converting $ELON into charity coins.

It feels like there's an unclaimed opportunity here to try to create something more corrective and lasting. But ultimately, I think even that creates some fundamental limitations, and that we can do better.

Robin Hood Game

In principle, people participate in memecoins because (i) the value is likely to go up, (ii) they feel democratic and open to anyone, and (iii) they are fun. We could siphon off a large portion of the memecoin supply to support public goods that people value, but this doesn’t directly help participants and actually comes at the expense of (i) and, if done poorly, (ii) as well. Can we do something to improve both of these aspects for average users?

The answer to (iii) is simple: don’t just make a coin, make a game. But make a truly meaningful and fun game . Don’t think Candy Crush on the blockchain; think World of Warcraft on the blockchain.

"Ethereum Researcher" in World of Warcraft. If you kill one you get 15 Silver, 61 Bronze, and a 0.16% chance of getting some "Ethereum Relay Data". Don't try this in real life.

Now, what about the Robin Hood part? One of the claims I often hear when I visit low-income Southeast Asian countries is that some people or their family members were previously poor but became moderately wealthy in 2021 through the earn-as-you-play feature of Axie Infinity. Of course, the situation is somewhat less favorable for Axie Infinity in 2022. But even so, my impression is that if you take into account the "earn-as-you-play" property of the game, the net financial benefit is negative on average for high-income users, but probably (emphasis on probably!) positive for low-income users . This seems like a nice property: if you have to be cruel to someone financially, be cruel to those who can handle it, but have a safety net to protect low-income users and even try to leave them better off than when they came in.

Regardless of how well Axie Infinity does this, it intuitively feels that (i) if the goal is to satisfy people’s desire to have fun, we shouldn’t be making simple copy-paste coins but more complex and interesting games, and (ii) games that make low-income players especially better off financially are more likely to leave their communities better off than when they came in. Charity coins and games could even be combined: one of the features of a game could be a mechanism where players who successfully complete a certain task can participate in a vote on which charities the issued funds should be allocated to.

That said, making a truly fun game is a challenge - see some of the negatives about Axie in terms of fun, and the positives about how they've improved since then. The team I personally have the most confidence in making fun crypto games is 0xPARC, as they've successfully made two (!!) crypto games (first Dark Forest, then FrogCrypto) that players are willing to play purely for fun, rather than out of a desire to make money. Ideally, the goal is to create a co-creative environment that makes all players happy: money is zero-sum, but fun can be positive-sum.

in conclusion

I have a personal code of ethics: “If you don’t like a certain type of person or group, be willing to praise at least a few of the best ones because they are most aligned with your values.” If you hate governments because they infringe on people’s freedoms, maybe you can find some space deep down to say something nice about the Swiss government. If you hate social media platforms because they rip off users and encourage harmful behavior, but you think Reddit is only half as bad, then say more good things about Reddit. The opposite approach — yelling “yeah, all X is wrong” — while it feels good in the moment, alienates people and pushes them further into their information cocoons, where they will completely block out any moral appeals you might make in the future.

I feel the same way about the “speculation” part of crypto. I have no interest in tokens named after totalitarian political movements, scams, carpetbaggers, that get people excited in month N but make everyone upset in month N+1. At the same time, I respect people’s desire to be entertained, and I’d rather crypto find ways to “go with the flow” rather than swim against it. So I’d like to see more attention for higher-quality fun projects that contribute positively to the ecosystem and the world around them (rather than just “attracting users”). At the very least, there should be more fun memecoins than trashy ones, and ideally they should support public goods rather than just profiting insiders and creators. Ideally, make games instead of tokens, and make projects that people enjoy participating in.