How meme culture is changing finance as we know it

Author: Ray Chan, CoinDesk; Translator: Tao Zhu, Golden Finance

Make money while laughing with friends? What could be better?

Memes are taking over finance. Behind the community forums, the ridiculous amounts of wealth that emerge in a few days, and the sometimes vulgar humor, something huge and meaningful is happening.

Memes: More Than Just JPEG

On the surface, memes are just photos and video clips that spread across the internet through text messages, social media timelines, and community forums. It's easy to overlook them as perhaps more than just a humorous reference. Memes convey subtle but powerful cultural meanings in a digitally native way. A meme that becomes popular in a community or culture often represents that group and its values ​​at a particular moment.

Blockchain technology offers the ability to financialize nearly anything digitally native, so it's only natural that cryptocurrencies have captured meme culture over the years. However, meme finance is not unique to cryptocurrencies. In both traditional and Web3 finance, meme finance has brought together powerful online communities. Now, financial gamification, while still in its infancy, is revealing a new path forward.

In TradFi, a fringe Reddit community in 2021 became a pioneer of community-first, anti-institutional, anti-rational finance that is deeply and inextricably tied to the intersection of gamification and humorous meme culture. The r/wallstreetbets community “sticks” to traditional finance, gaming traditional stock markets and reveling in their success through hilarious online posts.

In crypto, memecoins have always played a major role—attracting community-first finance that often spreads through the power of memes and market gamification.Early memecoin iterations like DOGE were followed by use-case specific versions like NFT collections, and now the next generation of low-cost blockchains like Solana are accelerating the process.

This has sparked an ongoing debate: Do memecoins need intrinsic value to succeed, or is enthusiastic community support and engagement enough? When we talk about “value,” do we mean a solid roadmap and utility, or does the real value lie in a vibrant community and the culture they create? Perhaps the true value of memecoins lies in their ability to unite and engage people, rather than following traditional financial metrics.

Making money with friends is fun

Everything that’s happening, both in traditional finance and crypto finance, suggests that something powerful is emerging. After decades of obscure, convoluted, and by-the-book ivory tower financial services, people are moving in the opposite direction. Discovering collective financial power, and then applying that power to markets, goes hand in hand with technologies that connect people around the world every day (e.g., Reddit) and democratize financial autonomy (crypto). All wrapped up in humorous, meme-based communities and the gamification of finance, which, at the end of the day, is just fun. It seems hard to imagine a world where this kind of community-driven, playful wealth creation does anything but grow.

We can think of the meme-ification and gamification of finance as the result of technologies merging into one another. Until now, the ways we’ve spent our time online have been fairly disparate. Social platforms, financial platforms, educational platforms, gaming platforms, etc. have all been separate from one another — isolated in their own digital silos.

Over the past 20 years, some of these industries have merged with one another. Gaming and social media have become inseparable, with platforms like Twitch specifically targeting the intersection of the two. With the power of cryptocurrencies, we’re also starting to see finance merge into social media.

It’s no surprise that the Asia-Pacific region is well ahead of the West in this convergence of technologies. Platforms like WeChat seamlessly combine commerce, social media, gaming, communications, and more. When all of these technologies merge with one another, what do the once separate ecosystems have in common? Culture. And how does culture spread online? Memes. We may not know what the next product that will satisfy everyone’s needs will be, but there’s one thing we can guarantee, and that’s what everyone needs to be happy: memes.

Cryptocurrency is changing the face of finance, but it’s not happening in a technological vacuum. It’s being accelerated by memes and the deep economic gamification at the heart of blockchain systems. The power of finance no longer lies in the knowledge of esoteric financial principles. It no longer even lies in the relationships built by stoic financial firms. The power of finance lies in community, virality, and deep cultural synchronicity.

Welcome to the age of the meme.