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How Memes and Gamification Are Changing Finance As We Know It
Making money with your friends while laughing at an inside joke? What’s better?
Memes are taking over finance. And behind the community forums, the comical volumes of wealth emerging in a matter of days, and the sometimes vulgar humor, something terrible and significant is happening.
On the surface, memes are just photos and video clips that zip around the internet in text messages, social media timelines, and community forums. It’s easy to ignore them and ignore that they might carry more than a humorous reference. Memes convey subtle but powerful cultural meaning in a digitally native way. A meme that’s popular in a community or culture often means something about that group and its values at that particular moment.
Blockchain technology has provided the ability to financialize almost anything digitally native, so it’s only natural that cryptocurrency has captured meme culture over the years. However, memeified finance isn’t unique to cryptocurrency. In traditional and Web3 finance, memeified finance has brought together powerful online groups. And now financial gamification, while still in its infancy, is revealing a new path forward.
In TradFi, a fringe Reddit Community in 2021 has become a pioneer of the kind of community-first, anti-institutional, anti-sensitive finance that is deeply and inextricably tied to the intersection of gamification and humorous meme culture. The r/wallstreetbets community has “hooked” itself up to traditional finance, playing with the traditional stock market and basking in its success with facetious online posts.
In cryptocurrency, memecoins have always played a major role, attracting the kind of community-first finance that typically spreads through the power of memes and market gamification. Early iterations of memecoins like DOGE were followed by use-case-specific versions like NFT collections, and are now being accelerated by low-cost, next-generation blockchains like Solana.
This raises an ongoing debate: do memecoins need intrinsic value to succeed, or is enthusiastic support and participation from their communities sufficient? When we talk about “value,” are we referring to a solid roadmap and utility, or is the true value in the vibrant communities and culture they create? Perhaps the true value of memecoins lies in their ability to unite and engage people rather than conform to traditional financial metrics.
Everything that is happening, both in traditional finance and crypto, speaks to something emerging and powerful. After decades of dark, obfuscated, rigid, ivory tower financial services, people are moving in the opposite direction. Discovering collective financial power and then applying that power to markets goes hand in hand with technologies that connect people on a daily, global basis (e.g. Reddit) and that democratize financial autonomy (crypto). All of this is wrapped up in humorous meme-based communities and financial gamification that, at the end of the day, is just plain fun. It seems hard to imagine a world where fun, community-driven wealth creation can do anything but grow.
We can think of the memeification and gamification of finance as the result of technologies integrating into one another. Until now, the different ways we have spent our time online have been quite distinct. Social platforms, financial platforms, educational platforms, gaming platforms, etc., have all been separated from one another, isolated in their own digital silos.
Over the past 20 years, some of these industries have already merged with each other. Gaming and social media are already inextricably linked, with platforms like Twitch specifically targeting the intersection of the two. Under the strength of cryptocurrency, we are starting to see finance merge with social media as well.
Undoubtedly, APAC is significantly ahead of the West in terms of this integration of technologies. Platforms like WeChat seamlessly combine commerce, social media, gaming, communication, and more. When all these technologies integrate into each other, what is the common thread between what were once separate ecosystems? Culture. And how does culture spread online? Memes. We may not know what the next product that will satisfy everyone’s needs will be, but one thing we can guarantee is that everyone needs happiness, and that is the meme.
Cryptocurrencies are changing the face of finance, but they are not happening in a technological vacuum. They are being accelerated by memes and the deep economic gamification that is fundamental to blockchain systems. The power of finance no longer lies in the knowledge of esoteric financial principles. It no longer even lies in the kind of relationships built in stoic financial corporations. The power lies in community, virality, and deep cultural synchronicity.
Note: The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of CoinDesk, Inc. or its owners and affiliates.