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The former CTO of Coinbase and general partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz said in a thread on X that memecoins aren’t wealth creation.
Jan 20, 2025, 3:57 a.m. UTC
As the official memecoin of the second Donald Trump presidency flirts with a market cap of $10 billion, and Melania Trump, the next first lady, launches her own, Balaji Srinivasan, the former CTO of Coinbase, said in a thread on X that this whole category of tokens could be equated to gambling.
A memecoin is a zero-sum* lottery.
There is no wealth creation. Every buy order is simply matched by a sell order. And after an initial spike, the price eventually crashes and the last buyers lose everything.
* It’s actually negative sum if the platform takes a cut.
“There is no wealth creation. Every buy order is simply matched by a sell order. And after an initial spike, the price eventually crashes and the last buyers lose everything,” he posted, calling memecoins a zero-sum – even negative sum after exchange fees – lottery.
Balaji said that memecoins should be approached in the same way as gambling in Las Vegas for entertainment purposes.
“Most should buy assets that retain their value over the long run,” he continued. “It is sometimes possible to add use cases to a memecoin, or to keep it in the headlines to keep its value aloft indefinitely. And we’ve seen examples of that as well.”
In response to the post, many asked Balaji if bitcoin was ever considered a memecoin, to which he argued that it wasn’t because of its use cases and decade-plus staying power.
You are free to consider any asset a memecoin, and I’m not offended by that, but I’m happy to explain why I think Bitcoin is different.
1) Bitcoin is the base layer asset of a blockchain with ~800 Th/s in hashrate across hundreds of datacenters worldwide.
2) It hasn’t been… https://t.co/tazGAzGnjn pic.twitter.com/58AZxtsy9a
“Bitcoin is the base layer asset of a blockchain with ~800 Th/s in hashrate across hundreds of datacenters worldwide,” he wrote. “It grew gradually over time, rather than all at once, and the mining issuance schedule limits how much can be sold by any one party.”
Market interest in the official Trump memecoin has sucked liquidity out of other memecoins, with CoinGecko data reporting that the category has shrunk by 8% in the last 24 hours. Many of the top memecoins like DOGE, SHIB, and BONK are down by over 10% on-day.
READ MORE: Bitcoin retraces to $100K, TRUMP Tanks 30% as Melania Memecoin Skyrockets
Sam Reynolds
Sam Reynolds is a senior reporter based in Asia. Sam was part of the CoinDesk team that won the 2023 Gerald Loeb award in the breaking news category for coverage of FTX's collapse. Prior to CoinDesk, he was a reporter with Blockworks and a semiconductor analyst with IDC.
