Meme-tokens are crypto-assets created on the basis of popular memes. The largest representatives of this category are characterised by loyal communities and the ability to grow sharply in value – including after large-scale market crashes.

Despite this, many people consider memes to be useless. For example, in early September, Simon McLaughlin, head of the Uphold platform, made it clear that the growth in the number of such assets by thousands per day was inadequate.

The POPCAT meme, the token based on which is one of the big hits of this bullrun

Which meme coins to buy

“It’s like playing roulette” – that’s how Cuban characterised the token trading of projects that are based on memes. According to him, the whole process is more like a game of musical chairs, where sooner or later there will be an overwhelming majority of losers along with one winner.

Billionaire and entrepreneur Mark Cuban

Here’s an expert comment cited by Decrypt.

Every meme project is a rag-poll in the making, right? Because there’s no real reason for it to exist other than fun. The token grows in value because more people got into it – it’s a game of musical chairs.


Recall, rag pools in the cryptocurrency industry are fraudulent schemes that involve the theft of investors' assets by the developers of a particular project. This happens under several scenarios. The simplest of them is the creation of a digital asset that attracts money from victims over a period of time. At first, nothing bad happens to it, giving the impression of an adequate product. However, then the developers drain their coin holdings and disappear. At times, they may also create new coins or use their hidden stocks on previously unknown wallets.

Rag pools became particularly common in the summer of 2020 as decentralised finance - and especially decentralised exchanges along the lines of the Uniswap platform - became popular. To implement the scheme, developers would wait for their own token to rise and then withdraw assets from the liquidity pool on the trading platform. In this way, they took the second asset from the trading pair - most often it was Efirium - and created an imbalance in the liquidity pool, which caused the price of their token to fall to almost zero.


Billionaire Mark Cuban

Cuban also suggested that the meme-token sphere is based on the greater fool theory, a hypothesis that posits that investors can buy assets regardless of fundamentals and still sell them at a profit to another investor.

That is, an investor who bought an overvalued asset can then repeat the process, finding another person to pay even more for it. Here’s his cue.

There’s hardly anyone foolish enough to think this is a great investment.

According to Cointelegraph’s sources, 381,401 new memcoins have been created on the Solana network in the last 30 days alone.

Many of these tokens lose 99 percent of their value or more just days or hours after launching on decentralised exchanges and protocols. The reason for Solana’s popularity in this context is the blockchain’s high throughput and low transaction fees.

New meme tokens in the Solana network

A common form of such projects are pampa and dump schemes. In other words, a hidden group of investors close to the creators of the token first regularly purchases the asset to inflate its price and popularity. When the project gets on the radar of other market participants, others start buying it, after which the first group gets rid of their tokens, “rolling up” the value to practically zero.

Nevertheless, several meme tokens in the history of the crypto market have managed to stand the test of time and secure their status as “blue chips”. In particular, this category includes popular “dog-themed” coins – Dogecoin, Shiba Inu, Dogwifhat and others. The first project claims to be one of the progenitors of memes within the crypto industry.

DOGE course in 3 months

By the way, Cuban has been an active supporter of Dogecoin before, accepting DOGE as payment for the purchase of goods of the Dallas Mavericks NBA team, which he previously owned. He later stated that Dogecoin has more applications than Cardano, the Tier 1 blockchain created by Efirium co-founder Charles Hoskinson.


However, Cuban's support for the Dogecoin project raises a logical question. If Mark thinks DOGE is not a bad asset, then why can't other such time-tested tokens appear in the niche over time? As of today, there are eight meme tokens in the top 100 cryptocurrencies by market capitalisation. They are Dogecoin, Shiba Inu, Pepe, dogwifhat, Bonk, Floki, POPCAT and Brett. Here is the corresponding list with the market capitalisation of the listed projects and their rates.


The biggest meme tokens in the cryptocurrency industry


Mark Cuban's criticism sounds logical even for fans of meme tokens. Still, one way or another, most holders of such cryptoassets only want to capitalise on the current trend and don't plan to hold memes for several years, which is not the case with full-fledged cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Solana. And with investors planning to get rid of tokens for the foreseeable future, the issue of this category collapsing may only be a matter of time. So we can still agree with the billionaire's point of view.