The Meme Coin Boom: Digital Prospectors Going Bust

Meme Coins Going Mainstream
Like the wild oil booms of the 19th century, meme coins have turned digital traders into modern-day speculators. Previously prospectors poured fortunes into unproven wells hoping to strike it rich, only to end up bankrupt when the land was dry. Similarly, meme coin purchasers are risking thousands of dollars hoping they turn into millions. These cryptocurrencies are created mostly as jokes, parody or to capitalize on internet & pop culture, now known as memes. Unlike traditional cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Ether, which assert intrinsic value or utility, meme coins are often launched without any real purpose or long-term vision. A meme coin will rely on humor, viral trends, or the popularity of internet figures to gain attention. Most are launched with nothing more than a silly name and a hyped-up narrative, yet they manage to attract billions of dollars from speculative traders. What many fail to realize, however, is that the game is often rigged before they even place their bets.
For many, the $TRUMP token was their first introduction to memecoins and likely to cryptocurrencies in general, but these speculative assets have been around almost as long as Bitcoin itself. The first wave emerged in 2013 with Dogecoin($DOGE), which began as a joke but quickly gained traction as an internet phenomenon. The cycle of speculation has remained consistent: a meme coin goes viral, early adopters and insiders profit from the hype, and latecomers are often left holding worthless tokens after the inevitable crash. The $TRUMP token’s explosive rise and steep decline in January 2025 followed this well-worn pattern, demonstrating once again how meme coins thrive on hype-driven volatility.
Unlike the crypto ICO craze of 2017-18, meme coins don’t provide any real utility and aren’t tokenized Securities. However, the one similar feature is allowing early investment before public release by a select few with connections and inside knowledge. Unlike traditional cryptocurrencies, the predictable nature of a meme coin, rapidly increasing in value over short periods of time before crashing, lures many speculators to try to “sell the top”. In the end, the only clear winners tend to be the ones close to the coin’s creator.
Meme coin popularity manages to thrive off the backs of many who didn’t sell fast enough. Many of these tokens are designed to benefit their creators the most, with developers and insiders secretly holding a large share of the total supply. Once enough investors buy in, these insiders cash out, causing the price to crash. Most liquidity pools are controlled by the creators, so they can pull out the funds at any time, further destabilizing that market.
What is most interesting, perhaps, is the seeming indifference that exists for what is essentially a rigged game. “Rug-pulling”, a term to describe the abandonment of the project by its creators, refers to "pulling the rug out from under" their investments. While there is no law on the books specifically concerning rug-pulling, most successful rug-pull ventures involve fraud, conspiracy, or other criminal acts. But the enforcement against such practices is vastly disproportionate to the volume of meme coins minted every day, especially when the creators are based in a different country than the investors. This is a widespread issue where sheer project volume and founder anonymity can facilitate such fraudulent activities within and across borders. The waters only get murkier when the very creator is a person of influence.