Introduction
People love to hate on crypto meme coins and calling them dead, but I am actually adding them to my portfolio.
I'll explain why I think meme coins are still a worthy investment in crypto, even as a long-term hold. I did say build wealth even with meme coins. There's a big difference between holding the largest meme coins like Dogecoin to get exposure to the sector rather than trying to trade the next low-cap meme coins but failing miserably.Even though hundreds of meme coins have come and gone for multiple years, the meme coin sector is still alive and well in crypto. It is the ninth largest sector by market cap today, and having exposure to this category is the topic we'll be discussing today. So let's get into it.Of course, with a broader audience, you won't have a community of highly experienced investors or blockchain developers to support your ecosystem. But what you do have is small everyday investors who hear about this coin, buy a little bit on their Robinhood app, and start telling all their friends and posting memes about it. This is the essence of a crypto project's community.My next point will probably trigger you, but sometimes meme coins can be safer
Memecoins vs Altcoins
Investments than super serious crypto. Adult, before you get mad, I'm not talking about new meme coins that are popping up in the market every day. The chart of 99% of meme coins looks like this, as there are complete scams because it takes very little effort to make them. However, for the few meme coins that have managed to establish themselves as a legitimate project and have become truly community-owned, they have much fewer attack vectors than serious crypto projects.
Think about these points:
Meme coins do not need to deliver on some elaborate technology roadmap since they never promised to do so. More development is obviously good, but developing technology is also much more costly and difficult and can make the parent company go bankrupt if they cannot get cash flow from it. This cannot happen to a meme coin.
Meme coins also cannot get hacked since they only need a coin to trade and don't have any DeFi responsibility or technology upgrade.
Meme coins usually have way better token distributions than serious projects since they don't have VCs or early investors to dump on the market.
Meme coins are usually launched at a very low price and only grow as their community becomes larger and larger since all the price discovery happened naturally. You don't have to worry about inflated valuations and market manipulation.
With all the positive things I just said about meme coins, I still think 99% of them are not worth holding. Today, let me give you the three meme coins that I am adding to my personal portfolio and why I think these coins specifically are worth having. If you're enjoying this video so far, don't forget to like and subscribe for more crypto narratives and altcoin insights
Dogecoin $doge
Dogecoin also has a super long price history dating back to 2014, which is even older than Ethereum. This also proves the survivability of meme coins as a sector. It is one of the oldest narratives in crypto that is still going strong. It's older than DeFi, gaming, AI coins, and just about everything else.Dogecoin has also followed the last two Bitcoin cycles for seven years and made two new all-time highs, just like most established altcoins. So, it's doing just fine without making any huge promises. Meme coins also follow the crypto cycles, so don't count them out in the next bull run when new investors come in. This time is not different.Dogecoin also has unironically one of the best tokenomics because it was fairly distributed since the very start. All of Dogecoin's supply has been circulating in the market for many years. This means there are no insiders who control the supply to dump on the market. At its peak, Dogecoin's price reached 70 cents in the 2021 bull market. From the current price of 6.4 cents, that's a solid 11x return if Dogecoin just manages to make a new all-time high.
Shiba Inu $shib
Now, Shiba Inu is one of the only meme coins that is building some real technology. There is a team behind the Shiba project. The original founder of Shiba Inu is an anonymous developer called Ryoshi, but today the ecosystem is led by another figure called Shaitoshi Kusama and his team. The Shiba Inu ecosystem also has three main coins: the main SHIP token, a second BONE token that acts as the governance token for the majority of the ecosystem applications, and a third token called LEASH, which is meant for farming on their own decentralized exchange. There is also a fourth token coming sometime in the future.
There are three main initiatives in the Shiba Inu ecosystem: they have their own decentralized exchange called Shiba Swap, the SHIB.io metaverse, and the latest and most important upgrade is their own layer 2 blockchain called Shibarium. This network went live in August, and right now is actually a pretty decent time to check this out because whenever a new layer 2 launches, there could be some new upcoming opportunities popping up. All of these initiatives directly integrate the SHIP token.
Although these are not groundbreaking projects, we also don't expect them to be anything special coming from the Shiba Inu meme. Most people join because of the Shiba Inu meme, and they might become users of one of these umbrella projects. However, the biggest advantage of Shiba Inu over Doge lies in this ecosystem dab because SHIP lives on the Ethereum blockchain and also has its own layer 2. Now, the user base is much more advanced. Most Shiba Inu holders are used to trading on a decentralized exchange and using other apps from their MetaMask wallet. Versus on Dogecoin, it's only a legacy blockchain that cannot support anything else other than transferring coins.
Pepe $pepe
The supply of Pepe is also almost fully distributed, with 93% already circulating. This is very healthy, just like Dogecoin and Shiba Inu. And if you look at the price again, it has completely flattened out for the past three months as most people have already exited after the initial hype. So really, now until the next year, around the Bitcoin halving event, is the make or break period for Pepe.
The team and the early investors have made enough money, so if they don't want to do any more marketing to expand the community, then the coin will slowly fade into irrelevance, like many other dying meme coins. However, if the team wants to keep pushing this coin, I think it's one of the only viral brands like the Doge meme that can truly catch on.
You might think this is silly, but what the meme is actually matters a lot for meme coins to really take off and continue to be relevant in multiple cycles. The meme brand has to be well-known in real internet culture, and it has to be easy to pronounce and recognizable just from looking at the picture. Think about other names like Floggy, Doji, La Mars, SafeMoon, Milady—what are these random names? They mean nothing outside of crypto, and that's why I think these will all fade into irrelevance because they never actually catch on to the meme itself.
Pepe, on the other hand, is just as recognizable as the Doge meme, and today, most people who know the Doge meme also have heard of Dogecoin in some sense. Dogecoin is just as viral as the original Doge meme. This is why Dogecoin continued to be relevant. Whenever you mention the Doge meme today, you have to mention Dogecoin—it has latched onto the original meme. That's the potential community growth of Pepe Coin. If Pepe Coin can keep growing its community outside of crypto and makes it as well-known as the original Pepe meme, the audience could grow another 30x or even 100x. This is essentially what happened to Dogecoin in the last two cycles.
It's a small chance of this happening, maybe 20% chance, but still, for this potential viral nature of Pepe Coin, the potential return is also massive, and that's why I still hold a tiny bit of Pepe Coin in my portfolio. Right now, I'm holding this coin truly to either 100x or zero. I think this is only possible with the Pepe meme, but not possible with all the other made-up meme coin names like Floggy, SafeMoon, or Milady.
If you're still with me after talking about pure meme coins, let's bring it back a bit.
Meme coins are a major category in crypto. By market cap, it is the ninth largest sector in all of crypto today. It is actually a bigger sector than AI coins, the gaming coins, or layer 2 coins. So, for the sake of diversification, it's worth having meme coins in your portfolio, as they make up a large chunk of the crypto market caps. The meme coin category is also relatively decoupled from other categories because it's so unique.