Crypto Community Debates Memecoin Culture and Impact on the Industry

According to Blockworks, as the popularity of memecoins continues to grow, established figures in the crypto industry have started addressing the issue. An anonymous crypto blogger, Polynya, criticized the crypto community's 'broken moral compass' and the prevalence of scams and degeneracy in the space. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin acknowledged the negative aspects of memecoin culture but also highlighted the potential for good, citing charity-focused coins and 'Robin Hood games' like Axie Infinity that benefit lower-income players. Variant Fund general partner Li Jin argued that viral tokens can be an effective go-to-market strategy for founders, as they can build a product around a vibrant community of memecoin users. An example of this is the BONK-incubated Telegram trading tool BONKbot. At the BUIDL conference in Seoul, a panel of crypto community leaders debated whether Solana, the blockchain where many memecoins are traded, should attempt to filter out racist memecoins. Meanwhile, Ethereum's recent Dencun upgrade introduced blobs, packets of data that have seen a surge in base fees due to the release of a platform called Ethscriptions, which allows users to create inscriptions on Ethereum blobs. Users have created numerous memecoins and blob-style NFTs, causing the base fee for blobs to jump significantly. Despite BlobScriptions being removed from Ethereum after approximately 18 days, the cost of including a blob in the next Ethereum block has not decreased. The average blob fee was 13.4 gwei, equivalent to roughly $0.45, while the gas fee on Ethereum layer-1 was 31 gwei at around the same time.