Memecoins *ARE* Real World Assets
The market has valued memes for millennia.
Coca-Cola is worth around $350 billion. Strip out the factories, the trucks, and the syrup contracts, and analysts still assign over $100 billion to the brand alone. Coke is a meme. An iconic story about happiness in a red can that people have been telling since 1886.
Gold is worth around $30 trillion. Roughly a tenth of that is industrial demand. The rest is a 5,000 year old story about scarcity and permanence. Gold is the original memecoin, and it’s the most valuable real world asset on earth.
So the question has never been whether memes have value. Markets settled that thousands of years ago. The real question is whether they need to have something like a company or a metal attached to them.
The answer is no. And the proof is in crypto.
Bitcoin came first. No company, no metal, no cash flows. Just a story about digital scarcity that people have been telling since 2009. Over time, the story grew into something like a religion. Sovereign money. Defense against inflation. A community bound by shared belief. The market prices that belief around $1.3 trillion as of July 2026.
Dogecoin came next. If anyone thought Bitcoin was a special case, a serious story that no other crypto could replicate, Dogecoin put that idea to rest. It launched in 2013 as a literal joke and never claimed to be anything else. Thirteen years later, it’s worth over $11 billion and US regulators have officially classified it as a digital commodity. This joke of a coin now sits in the same asset class as gold.
Bitcoin and Dogecoin are not exceptions. They are just two of the earliest and so far the largest examples. But there have been countless others already in crypto.
Some may wonder why crypto is where more meme value is suddenly coming into existence. It’s because crypto lets anyone make a market for anything. And markets make value legible where it wasn’t before. So value that was never before measurable is now suddenly tradable. Trillions of dollars of it.
Most people don’t understand this yet. Especially not those trained in the fundamentals of traditional finance, with their livelihoods dependent on things staying mostly the way they are. I started my career in investment banking. Trust me, there’s no rocket science or immutable laws of physics there. I have a much better understanding of value now than I did then. And the entire financial world is going to need to catch up.
The reality is that every asset has a component of value comprised of intangible elements like narrative, attention, and belief. I call this the “memium.” It’s the meme premium component of any asset’s price. “Meme stocks” like GameStop and AMC have market caps that have at times been almost entirely comprised of memium value. More genuinely high-value companies like Tesla also have huge memiums. Your favorite brands likely have large memiums as well. A memecoin is just 100% memium value. There is no company, no metal, and no product. It’s a pure play with infinite upside.
When revenue and cash flows exist, the market prices assets based on multiples of those metrics. Even without revenue, when a product exists, the market prices its potential. Fundamentals are like gravity. A pure meme has none. There is nothing to discount, nothing to anchor, and nothing to cap. A memecoin is worth whatever the world believes it is worth at a given time.
The midcurve objection is simple. If there are no cash flows and there is no utility, there can be no value. But this way of thinking is quite obviously flawed. It fails to account for the value of gold, art, collectibles, and most of the brand value sitting on corporate balance sheets, like Coca-Cola’s. The midcurves accept the meme premium everywhere except where it is the most transparent about being one. That is why they are midcurves.
Of course, the infinite potential of purity cuts both ways. Where a company’s stock will have some floor value supported by the fundamentals, memecoins do not enjoy such a luxury. So most memecoins “go to zero”, just as most startups fail. But a brutal failure rate is present everywhere there’s a power law dynamic in play. And there’s a big difference between mostly failures and all failures when just a single winner can be worth over one trillion dollars.
The winning memecoins all hold the same asset. Attention. Everything else in the modern economy is increasingly abundant. Attention is the scarcest and most valuable resource that remains. Keeping and compounding it requires decentralized coordination, the hardest problem of all. A memecoin that sustains both is a tribe with a ticker. Tokenized attention with a liquid market.
It should be no surprise that people are increasingly finding their tribes online, aligning around tokens the way they once aligned around churches, teams, and towns. A tribe with a treasury develops ambitions. Push this to the extreme and the largest memecoin communities could start to look like early drafts of new kinds of nations with shared flags, economies, stories, and currencies. There is no land required, but it could be acquired. Having spent a couple years working with Balaji on The Network State, I find this kind of potential to be the most interesting aspect of memecoins and the communities rallied around them. Everyone knows the greatest technologies often begin looking like toys. Even the midcurves can agree memecoins have that part down. But the potential is serious, and soon it will show.
The bear market has everyone focused on only the most unimaginative use cases for crypto like stablecoins and tokenized stocks. These things are all well and good, but the limiting idea that they are all that crypto has to offer is nonsense. Previous bear markets had most people believing crypto was dead. Most now accept it will live, but this bear market has people believing crypto is going to be boring. These people are in for a big surprise.
There is nothing more real and valuable in 2026 than pure, unadulterated attention.
Memecoins are the purest valuation of attention the world has ever seen.
Memecoins ARE real world assets.
The earlier you get this, the better off you’ll be.