The Money Game: Anonymous

A Trip to the Meme-Coin Casino “I think this is all stupid and absurd. But I’m not going to complain.”

- Illustration by Simoul Alva

In 2021, we learned we could speculate on anything. Through NFTs, investors traded on emoji, tweets, jpegs, and farts. And in the memecoin market, a lot of people made a lot of money on inside jokes. For the uninitiated, a meme coin is a crypto asset based on a meme or an internet joke. Unlike other cryptocurrencies, which try to serve a real-world purpose, the point of most meme coins isn’t really to do anything. Instead, they’re largely vehicles for speculation, their value driven by hype. Meme coins generally begin at a price of a few cents or less but can quickly soar to hysterical highs, making them beloved by the Robinhood crowd. Here, a student turned crypto trader in his mid-20s shares his frenzied journey through the meme casino and what it was like to make his first million.

I FIRST BOUGHT BITCOIN in 2019 in order to buy drugs. I put in $500 and forgot about it, and when I checked at the end of 2020, I had $2,000. So I started putting my savings in little by little. I was doing really boring stuff, just buying coins and holding them. Then, this past August, Visa bought a CryptoPunk, which is a very blue-chip NFT, and I thought, Shit, maybe I should look at NFTs. I got lucky—I ended up minting the rarest type of one NFT, which was worth more than $200,000 at its peak. I was feeling good and decided to put all the money I had in crypto into NFTs, which by then was about $75,000. Half of it was mine—it was basically all my savings after I maxed out my 401(k). The other half was from my dad, and the plan was to split the profits with him. But two weeks later, halfway through October, NFT prices dropped. And NFTs just kind of died.