As memecoin mania deepens, more established cryptocurrency players have begun to address the proliferation of fleeting tokens head-on.
Popular anonymous crypto blogger Polynya published a post on his blog denouncing The "broken moral compass" of cryptocurrencies.
โAt this point, this evil in cryptocurrencies is banal and normalized. This has become the identity of cryptocurrencies; sure, some useful stuff, but mostly just infested with scams and outright degeneracy,โ they wrote, expressing particular disdain for the racist and sexist memecoins that have emerged in the past two weeks.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin weighed in on the matter and acknowledged the ugly side of memecoin culture, but values โโโpeople's desire to have funโ and believes that memecoins can be an avenue for good.
He points to charity-focused coins and โRobin Hood gamesโ like Axie Infinity that financially benefit low-income players as examples.
Read more: Cheatsheet: Vitalik Buterin says there is nothing "new and interesting" about memecoins
Variant Fund general partner Li Jin defended the business case for memecoins, saying viral tokens represent an effective go-to-market strategy for founders.
"While traditional GTM involved 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 that incorporates that. token," Jin wrote, citing BONK-incubated Telegram trading tool BONKbot as an example.
Read more: BONKbot volumes surge as memecoin DeFi uses grow
At the BUIDL conference in Seoul this week, a panel of crypto community leaders debated whether solariumThe blockchain where many memecoins are traded should try to filter out racist memecoins, CoinDesk reported.
'BlobScriptions' stress test new Ethereum blobs
The base rate for blobs, which are data packets entered by Ethereum's Recent Dencun Upgradesurged this week when the Ethscriptions platform launched a platform for creating Ethereum blob inscriptions.
So-called BlobScriptions are like Bitcoin ordinal in the sense that they create a low-cost way for users to enroll arbitrary data on the blockchain. Users created a torrent of possible memecoins and blob style NFTscausing the base rate of blobs to increase by billions of percent
Read more: Blob Base Fee Rises, Ethereum Loses Spaces as 'BlobScriptions' Go Viral
BlobScriptions are removed from Ethereum after about 18 days, but users were undeterred.
As of Friday afternoon, the cost of including a blob in the next Ethereum block had yet to drop. The average blob fee was 13.4 gwei at press time, according to ultrasound.money, equivalent to approximately $0.45. The gas fee on Ethereum layer 1 was 31 gwei around the same time, according to Etherscan.
Until BlobScriptions became popular, blob space, which is used by layer-2 sending transaction logs to Ethereum, was effectively free.
An interesting statistic:
- Dogwifhat overtook Pepe to become thirdlarger memecoin with a market capitalization of more than $4.1 billion, according to CoinGecko.
Also noteworthy:
- A Bored Ape is believed to have been owned by comedian Kevin Hart sold for around 13.8 ether, well below the 79.5 ether it was supposedly purchased for in 2022. According to a lawsuit from that same year, Yuga Laboratories was believed to have gifted Hart and other celebrities Bored Apes as part of an undisclosed promotional effort.
- Degen, a popular memecoin community on Farcaster, built a layer 3 chain using Arbitrum and Base.
- A Blast-based Web3 game called Munchables suffered a $62.5 million loss blowbut apparently the developer is behind the hack shared the private key to recover assets.
Don't miss the next big story - join our free daily newsletter.
