Are MEMEs the opium of the crypto world? Various parties engage in heated debate over VC coins versus MEMECOINs
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Are MEMEs the opium of the crypto world? Various parties engage in heated debate over VC coins versus MEMECOINs
Why do retail investors rush into memes? It's not that they don't care about value—it's just that losing the last $10 they have is simply too painful to bear...
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsYesterday, Jocy, founder of IOSG, shared a post on X criticizing the meme coin frenzy in the Eastern crypto community. In an article titled "The Eastern Crypto Community Cannot Remain Forever Meme-Driven—It Needs a Spark to Ignite a Prairie Fire", he expressed strong discontent with the current obsession over memes.
He stated, “Memes are like opium—an imported Western drug. Currently, the top meme coins on Binance originate from the West. Founders and community builders can easily lose their way amid this noise. The Eastern crypto community is deeply immersed in meme speculation. After witnessing the success of meme coins, many entrepreneurs begin doubting their original startup visions and motivations. I believe founders should resist meme coins, avoid shifting their entrepreneurial focus toward them, and certainly refrain from mass-producing and hyping up memes!”
In Jocy’s view, meme speculation has a lottery-like effect, where the probability of later participants winning keeps decreasing. Like opium, memes create path dependency among early beneficiaries. More people then act as advocates (akin to compradors) within communities, reinforcing this profit-seeking behavior. However, this does not make our technical protocols or communities more distinctive or robust. While early adopters may profit, such short-sighted gambling and get-rich-quick myths will ultimately burst the bubble, leading to disaster for the Eastern crypto market—repeating the story of NFTs in the last bull cycle.
Finally, Jocy shared his hopes and stance: “I firmly believe most frontline Eastern entrepreneurs will continue building at the forefront, finding their own unique piece within the Lego set of infra or applications, advancing alongside—or even surpassing—mainstream Western protocols. IOSG will support and invest in forward-thinking young innovators to drive long-term industry and community development, helping Eastern entrepreneurs shine globally.”
His clear and resolute position has sparked discussions across the industry.
Some expressed support, arguing that chasing meme coins en masse is akin to drinking poison to quench thirst. Memes only pretend to be fair; behind them lie market makers and large whales, pushing an already fragile industry into deeper nihilism, ultimately accelerating its collapse.
On Twitter, however, strong opposition also emerged. To these critics, it's not that memes are inherently good—it's that VC coins are simply too bad. "Existence implies justification," they argue; retail investors turn to memes because they're forced into it by high-FDV VC projects.
TechFlow has compiled selected Twitter responses to this viewpoint, offering a glimpse into how this cycle’s market participants perceive VC coins versus meme coins. Some views have been slightly condensed:
XIN YAN, Co-founder of Ethsign: Meme coins thrive precisely because VC coins are becoming increasingly disconnected from reality
VC coins and memecoins aren't mutually exclusive. On the contrary, good VC coins should possess strong meme attributes—examples include Monad and Berachain. VC attributes represent functionality and moats, while meme attributes reflect resonance with the community. The trend toward modularity means many VC coins solve overly specific problems that retail users cannot perceive or participate in. Even if such tokens have utility, it's limited to narrow use cases. Projects that still reject meme-ifying their values or communities might as well become software-as-a-service companies and skip issuing tokens altogether. The successes of Base and Berachain increasingly prove that in crypto, community > technology. Technology can always be copied—every L2 is actively promoting its own tech solutions—but without community engagement and on-chain activity, they’ll end up merely being technology providers.
Vincent, Partner at AC CAPITAL: Meme is not a category but an attribute
The problem lies in how VCs position memes as adversaries. They fail to realize that meme isn’t a sector—it’s an attribute. If VC-backed coins don’t offer retail investors ways to participate, speculate, and profit, but instead focus solely on attracting TVL from big players, then yes, they’re worse than memes. At least memes allow participation. Pretending to pursue noble ideals while actually courting whales and forming exclusive clubs—that’s what people truly object to.
H.E. ZEPUMP, VC Practitioner: The issue with VCs is overvaluing useless technology and undervaluing vibrant culture and community
The core problem in this industry is that VCs assign sky-high valuations to useless technologies while severely undervaluing engaging cultures and communities. Communities are built on consensus—yet VC-funded projects often lack any real community. So why should anyone buy into them? A token doesn’t represent underlying technology—it prices user attention. Instead of packaging shallow tech as deep innovation and force-selling it to retail, teams should first understand what a token truly is and how to sell it more effectively.
Davy, Crypto KOL: What people hate isn’t value-driven coins, but air coins pretending to have value
I agree that crypto shouldn’t be just about memes—we should strive for higher value. But I differ from Jocy in two key aspects: First, memes are a natural outcome of market phases, and they lead to a better—not worse—crypto ecosystem. Memes are essentially musical chairs, but do they hold value? Yes, to some extent. This simple, brute-force wealth game aligns deeply with human nature, making it highly attractive and effective for bringing new users into crypto. No one should ignore this fact: people enter crypto primarily chasing wealth effects—whether it was early Bitcoin, later ICOs, then Doge and Shiba, or recently inscriptions. After each wave of irrational speculative frenzy, crypto hasn’t gotten worse—it’s grown stronger, with more believers in Bitcoin and broader ecosystem development. Therefore, we needn’t fear bubbles overshadowing value or memes diluting Bitcoin’s idealism or blockchain’s foundational principles. Market evolution follows its own logic. We don’t need to worry—quality things improve over time; inferior ones get eliminated. This time around, memes won’t eliminate Bitcoin or crypto—they’ll eliminate those fake “air coins” and “scythe coins” masquerading as value projects.
Second, valuable projects don’t automatically mean valuable tokens. Not every project can claim to be a “value coin.” The opposite of a meme isn’t necessarily a value coin—it could just be another “air coin.” “Value coin” is an overly vague term. Ideally, it should be defined by what problem the project solves and what it contributes to the world. But here’s the flaw: a project may have value, yet its token might not. Logically, solving a real need confers some level of value—that part is valid. But at the token level, things differ. Tokens can be pumped to extreme highs—a result of market frenzy and randomness seemingly detached from project teams or VCs. In such cases, both retail and VCs are investors, yet their rights, responsibilities, and benefits are completely unequal. VCs invest at $0.0001, leveraging their status and industry connections. Retail, however, buys in at secondary markets, purchasing chips priced at $0.001 under carefully crafted narratives co-developed by the team and VCs. With help from professional market makers, these tokens can be artificially inflated over days, followed by a 70% crash—completing a textbook-style launch and exit strategy. This is unfair! Retail buys tokens but gains nothing. Though it may seem like “buyer beware,” retail has legitimate demands: listing prices should not deviate excessively from true value! Why do retail investors flock to memes? Not because they disregard value or ideals, but because after being burned so many times—“the last $10”—they simply can’t take it anymore…
Mindao, Founder of dForce: The East-West divide boils down to language
The fundamental East-West difference lies in language. Non-English ecosystems struggle to create globally influential movements, public chains, or infrastructure due to linguistic limitations—a structural disadvantage that no individual can overcome. And it's not just Web3 suffering from this constraint.
For consumer-facing apps, Chinese-speaking entrepreneurs naturally hold an edge, given the region’s massive localized market—the largest single consumer base globally.
Memes, whether Eastern or Western, reflect underlying social currents—Western financial nihilism and leftward drift, Eastern tendencies toward “lying flat.” These cultural and social movements are inherently constrained by language and extremely difficult to globalize.
Oar, Founder of Scope Protocol: Meme is not a project—it’s a culture
Meme is culture, spirit, a vibe—not an alternative type of project. What stands opposed to memes isn’t infra or dApps, but pointless party games. Retail hates projects with fewer than 10 DAUs but FDVs pushed to $10B just because some big-name investor backed them—not the actual infra and dApps that deliver real value to users and Web3.
qinbafrank, Crypto KOL: VC firms and projects must move beyond slogans and take constructive actions to reverse the current market困境
Personally, I don’t think the East-West divide is the main issue today. In fact, many Western projects are equally meaningless and valueless: repeatedly reinventing wheels, using point systems to fabricate false prosperity, and collaborating between VCs and founders to inflate primary market valuations—all driven by so-called Western institutions and project teams. Most Western founders may not be much different from their Eastern counterparts—focused less on creating value and more on extracting wealth.
The current market enthusiasm for memes isn’t unique to the East. In fact, major memes like Pepe, WIF, and BOME originated in the West before spreading globally. The deeper reason lies in widespread disillusionment with so-called “value projects”: lack of real-world use cases, endless wheel-reinvention, failure to create value, unreasonable capital structures, and absurdly high primary valuations—all root causes behind this phenomenon.
Change won’t come from merely shouting slogans like “stop focusing only on trading activities and start building infra and protocols to foster better community vibes.” Real change requires concrete actions from institutions and project teams. Below are my personal suggestions:
1. Seek genuine project value and focus on real-world implementation;
2. Founders and institutions must exercise restraint and build healthy, rational capital structures;
3. Establish mechanisms to reward token holders.
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