Something fascinating is happening with meme coins. If you haven’t followed, a flurry of new meme coins have been created and traded the past few weeks.

Or why consumer products in crypto are so powerful.

Money is not the only currency. That’s not from me, that’s from Ye. When we consider the meteoric rise of the creator economy over the past couple of years, this simple statement rings profoundly true. Currency exists in time, influence, connection, audience, and perhaps most important of all, in attention. It’s no surprise that social tokens have emerged as the most efficient and effective way to capture that much broader definition of currency that has much more to do with value than it does with money. 

At the start of the Industrial Revolution in the late 18th century, entrepreneurs seeking wealth started profit-generating endeavors using two new tools: corporations and equity. Capital was scarce, so, as with any rare good, to accumulate it conferred a great deal of power, access, and status. Several generations of entrepreneurs began amassing capital by creating businesses, with value captured by equity. The family names of many of these titans of industry have made it into modern parlance as synonyms of wealth and status—Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt.