BitMEX founder Arthur Hayes says that memecoins are a net positive for blockchain ecosystems, despite criticisms.
In a new interview with Real Vision founder Raoul Pal, Hayes says memecoins are a “powerful” form of expression for the masses.
“You move to ETH then you move to Solana, and then all of a sudden you’re trading Slerf, or Dogwifhat, and it’s fun. It’s just humans experimenting and playing games with each other that have monetary payouts on the internet. I think it’s a lot of fun.
Obviously, trade with responsibility and all that kind of stuff. But it’s pure emotion, there’s no central authority telling you what you can or can’t do. Whatever someone wants to list, they just do it and it either succeeds or fails instantly, and I think that’s super powerful. And for the first time in a long time people are having fun doing this thing called trading.
Some of it is tasteless memes but whatever.”
Hayes argues that memecoins – while many are skeptical of their intrinsic value – ultimately bring attention and value to blockchains. He references Solana (SOL) and its easy-to-use user interface (UI) as an avenue to onboard more new users to its ecosystem.
“The chains that can support [that] culture are going to be the chains that have value. So Solana – and I’m a bit of an ETH maxi in terms of who has the best decentralized internet computer – but at the end of the day, if the Solana price is going up because people are launching these memecoins on it and a new developer to this space says, ‘Oh, this is interesting, I want to develop on Solana because I know I have users.’
Why does Solana have users? Well, it’s a very easy platform with a good UI/UX (user experience) to launch these dog money coins, and so it brought attention.
So yes, you can poo-poo these things as stupid and valueless but if it brings attention, if it brings more engineers to the space, then it’s positive value to the chain itself.”