A meme with a price

In the last piece I traced how a dog meme built in an afternoon became, twelve years later, an asset class with a sitting president's name on it. I ended on the question that actually matters, the one most people skip past because it sounds rhetorical: why does a joke have a price at all? It isn't rhetorical. It has a real answer, and the answer turns out to be one of the more useful lenses you can own for understanding modern markets — not just the silly corner of them, but all of them.

The lazy take is that meme coins have no value, that it's all a delusion, greater fools handing money to greater fools. That's half right and completely unilluminating, because by that logic a great deal of what we treat as serious has "no value" either. The harder, truer take is this: a meme coin is a meme with a price — a tradable Schelling point — and that is the honest version of what a surprising amount of finance already is. Once you see it, you can't unsee it.

First, the meme

The word is older than the internet. The biologist Richard Dawkins coined "meme" in 1976, in The Selfish Gene, to name a unit of cultural transmission — an idea, tune, phrase, or style that copies itself from mind to mind by imitation, the way a gene copies itself from body to body.¹ A successful meme is simply one that gets copied a lot. The internet turned this from a slow biological process into a fast industrial one: a format, a dog, a phrase can now leap across millions of brains in a day.

A meme coin is what happens when you bolt a price onto that replicator. The coin doesn't change the meme; it lets you take a position on it. If the meme spreads, more people want the coin, and the price rises. If it dies, the price dies. The token is, quite literally, a financial instrument whose underlying is cultural attention. That sounds absurd until you notice you already live in an economy where attention is the scarcest resource there is — where the largest companies on earth are, fundamentally, machines for capturing and reselling it. The meme coin is just the most naked claim on that resource anyone has yet built.

Why a focal point has value

The deeper mechanism is coordination. The economist Thomas Schelling won a Nobel partly for a simple, profound idea: when people need to converge without being able to talk it out, they gravitate to a focal point — an option that stands out, that everyone expects everyone else to also pick. Ask strangers to meet in New York with no further instructions and a striking number name Grand Central at noon. Nothing makes Grand Central "correct." It's correct because everyone guesses everyone else will guess it.²

A meme is a near-perfect Schelling point. Everyone already knows the dog, the joke, the format — so when a crowd is looking for the same thing to pile into, the famous meme is the obvious convergence. That's why memes, and not random strings, become coins: the shared recognition is the coordination. And coordination, it turns out, is most of what gives a moneyless thing a price. Which leads to the uncomfortable part.

The uncomfortable mirror

Take the thing economists say to dismiss meme coins — "the price is just what the next person will pay, there's no fundamental anchor" — and write it down. For an asset with no cash flow, today's fair price is just the expected price tomorrow:

This is the "greater fool" relation, and it's true of meme coins. The trouble for the dismissal is that it's also true, in whole or in part, of a lot of assets we treat as respectable. Gold pays no cash flow; it has been a Schelling point for "store of value" for five thousand years, and that consensus is the entire reason it's worth $3,000+ an ounce instead of its modest industrial value. A dollar is a shared belief backed by the expectation that others will keep believing. Even a growth stock priced at a hundred times earnings is mostly a story about the future, only loosely tethered to today's numbers. Keynes saw this in 1936: the stock market, he wrote, is a beauty contest where you don't pick the face you find prettiest — you pick the face you think the other judges will pick.³

So here is the steelman, and I think it's stronger than meme-coin skeptics admit: every asset's price is part fundamentals and part story — part what it earns and part what the crowd believes others will believe. A meme coin isn't a violation of that principle. It's the principle with the fundamentals subtracted to zero, so you can see the story component by itself, undiluted. As the writer Omid Malekan put it in a thoughtful defense of the form, "you can't democratize an inherently absurd thing without cracking some jokes along the way."⁴ The meme coin is finance admitting, out loud, that it was always partly a game of mutual belief. That admission is genuinely clarifying.

People will speculate on anything

If price is partly a coordination game, then the urge to play it will spread to anything that can carry a position — and by 2025 it has. Look at how broadly the same impulse runs. Americans wagered roughly $150 billion on sports in 2024.⁵ Zero-day options — bets on where an index closes today — grew to about half of all S&P 500 options volume.⁶ Prediction markets put live odds on elections and ballgames. NFTs turned JPEGs into positions. Meme stocks turned a dying retailer into a movement. These are not separate manias. They are one culture — a generation that treats taking a position as a default mode of participation, the way an earlier one treated having an opinion.

The mood underneath has a name. The investor Travis Kling called it financial nihilism: "Why not put $500 into a memecoin that could 50x, knowing that you could likely lose most or all of it? It's not like the $500 is enough to make any difference anyway."⁷ Read it without contempt and it's almost rational. If the straight path — save, compound, buy a house — feels foreclosed, then a lottery ticket on a dog isn't obviously the dumber bet. It's a small, voluntary tax on the only thing still affordable: the chance, however slim, of escape velocity. Meme coins are the asset class of a generation that stopped believing the patient game would pay, and decided to play the fun one instead.

What's hard — the catch in the steelman

I've spent this piece building the strongest case for meme coins I honestly can, because I think the contemptuous dismissal is intellectually lazy and the steelman is genuinely interesting. But the steelman has a hard ceiling, and I won't pretend otherwise.

Here's the catch. Gold's Schelling point is five thousand years old and globally shared; a meme coin's is five days old and held by a Discord. The mirror is real — every asset is part story — but it is a matter of degree, and degree is everything. An asset that is only story, with the fundamentals subtracted all the way to zero, has nothing to fall back on when attention moves, and attention always moves. Worse, the equation above cuts both ways: if your only return comes from the next buyer, then the whole thing is, in aggregate, zero-sum minus fees. There's no business growing a pie. Every dollar a winner takes out is a dollar a later buyer put in. That's not investing in any sense that survives scrutiny; it's a game of musical chairs played with real money, dressed as culture.

And "culture" is doing a lot of load-bearing work that often isn't earned. The honest version — a community genuinely rallying around a shared joke — is rare. The common version is manufactured: a coordinated launch, paid influencers performing organic enthusiasm, insiders who bought the focal point before they sold it to you. The line between a Schelling point and a trap is whether the person pointing at it already owns it. Which is exactly where the next piece goes — from the why to the machine: the platform that industrialized the manufacture of these focal points, made an extraordinary fortune doing it, and turned "a meme with a price" into a coin a minute.