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On MSCHF and Meme Coins

On MSCHF and Meme Coins

Sell out and be stupid.

17 Jul

Dani Loftus on brand piggybacking, courting controversy and making you pay to get trolled.

This article was originally published on This Outfit Does Not Exist.

Meme coin — A meme coin is a cryptocurrency that originated from an internet meme or has some other humorous characteristic.

MSCHF — MSCHF is an art and media company known for creating viral and controversial products and projects.

As of June 2024, the top 5 meme coins have a combined market cap of over $50 billion.

To put that into perspective, the GDP of Jordan, a country with a population of 11.3 million is $48.65 billion (2022), that of Bolivia, a country with a population of 12.2 million is $44 billion (2022), and that of Bahrain, an oil rich nation with a population of 1.42 million is $44.3 billion (2022).

This means that over the course of their lifespan the 5 top contenders in joke-centric internet money have generated more economic value than the GDP of 97 out of 180 of the world's economies.

WTF.

In a similar vein of absurdity, 5 years ago MSCHF—a 10 (ish) member art collective operating out of Brooklyn, New York—sold their first product, a virus infected computer titled "The Persistence of Chaos", for $1.3 million on streaming platform Twitch.

Since this watershed moment, MSCHF have sold a microscopic Louis Vuitton handbag for $63,750, Birkenstocks made of sliced-up Hermes Birkins for $76,000 per pair, and 666 sets of AirMax sneakers each containing a drop of rapper Lil Nas X’s blood for $1,018 each.

WTF.

The next 3,000 words will unpack these archetypes of financial farce, looking into their history to examine why and how they work. It will argue that, even though one presents as a brand and the other a financial asset, the fundamental success of both meme coins and MSCHF stem from the same roots.

Are you sitting incredulously? Then I’ll begin.

A brief history of meme coins and MSCHF

To state the blatantly obvious, there would be no meme coins without memes.

Described by Know Your Meme founder Jamie Dubs as a ‘transmittable unit of culture,’ memes are analogous to genes: those that resonate live on, whilst those that lack cultural impact are quickly forgotten.

With this definition in mind, it should come as no surprise that the word ‘meme’ is credited to none other than evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins.

In his book, The Selfish Gene, Dawkins claims that, "we need… a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation." So, pulling from the English ‘memory’, the French ‘même’ meaning ‘same’, and the Greek ‘mimoúmai’ meaning ‘to imitate’ he came up with the term ‘meme.’

But don’t let that fool you into thinking memes are a recent invention.

Many memeologists cite the Bible as the meme’s point of origin, framing the Old Testament as a network of cultural items conveyed with consistency across centuries. Indeed, if you compare two parables of temptation—the classic story of Adam and Eve, which is found in the creation myth of all Abrahamic religions, and the more contemporary Distracted Boyfriend meme, the most influential object naming meme of 2018 according to Slate—the similarities are evident.