Polychain CEO Olaf Carlson-Wee say retail and institutional investors have different ways of approaching meme coins, with virality being a core value that drives the market.
Summary
- Polychain CEO Olaf Carlson-Wee said institutions see meme coins as speculative “gambling tools,” while retail investors value them for their social and viral characteristics.
- He proposed tokenizing social media posts to replace ad-driven models with market-based monetization, allowing users and communities to profit directly from viral content.
At the Token2049 conference in Singapore on Oct. 1, Polychain CEO Olaf Carlson-Wee delivered a keynote speech with the main theme “Meme Coins are Information Markets.” Carlson-Wee stated that there are major differences regarding how most investors see meme coins.
He stated in his speech that institutional investors often view meme coins as instruments used for “gambling and zero-sum games.” This means that unlike major cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH), which institutions might view as long-term assets with utility or as hedges, meme coins are often regarded as highly speculative tokens with little intrinsic value.
As a result, they hardly take meme coins seriously for their underlying fundamentals; seeing them more as gambling tools due to their volatile nature and short-term price swings. The volatility of these tokens make them ideal for zero-sum trading, where one investor could win big at the expense of other traders’ losses.
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This sort of approach explains why many large funds and traditional institutions are still reluctant to engage with meme coins, despite their massive retail popularity.
The Polychain CEO remarked that this directly contrasts how retail investors view meme coins. While institutional investors see meme coins as high risk assets, retail investor enthusiasm has always driven the meme coin market higher and higher.
Carlson-Wee stated that retails investors are driven to buy meme coins more for their social characteristics rather than their monetary value. A famous meme turned into a token may attract a high volume of traders simply because retail investors decided the token was worth pumping.
Therefore, the Polychain CEO believes the core value of meme coins lie in their social aspect. They unlock a new form of monetization that relies on community sentiment and virality to boost numbers. Unlike traditional tokens, meme coins often rise simply because people rally around a joke, a viral meme, or personality.
Polychain CEO wants to turn social media posts into tokens
Looking back on the viral meme coin craze, Polychain CEO Olaf Carlson-Wee remarked that efforts to monetize social media influence have been been extremely inefficient. This is because it would require endorsement contracts outside of social platforms to profit, as the platforms themselves cannot share revenue.
Building upon the success of meme coins, Carlson-Wee suggested that social media could be completely transformed if it deployed blockchain technology and tokenization instead of relying on the current advertising-driven model.
He argued that one day social media posts could even be minted into tokens, with users being able to earn profits from the popularity and sharing of their content. Each post would be minted and sharing it could lead to users earning yield profits. Such a system would eliminate the algorithmic content ranking and replace it with market forces.
By tokenizing social media accounts, users can trade using accounts and transaction fees would be reaped reshares. For creators, this means that a viral post would no longer simply translate into likes or follows alone, but into tangible earnings distributed on-chain.
Carlson-Wee believes this sort of dynamic could elevate the role of online communities, turning them from passive followers into active trading hubs where attention and influence are monetized at a higher level.
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