This is purely speculation, but I think that crypto is a huge component of the meme-fication that we’re seeking of financial services.

Sure, maybe people are just bored and turning to trading stonks as a way to get their dopamine fix while they’re locked at home.

And sure, there are non-crypto meme communites that @financegod and r/wsb that don’t even talk about crypto.

But I think that crypto paved the way for the Internet to embrace finance as a topic worthy of meme-ing.

And I say that because crypto is the internet-native form of money.

Every other form of money or financial services is somehow still tied to the real world — banks, brokerages, the stock market.

Crypto is purely digital.

With that intrinsic quality of being internet-native, crypto is better suited to be embedded into the culture of the internet.

The Internet has always had the ability to aggregate previously fringe behavior into mainstream sub-cultures.

That’s why previously “nerdy” activities like anime, gaming, and comic book superheroes are now international movements.

Gaming is a digital-digit CAGR industry, with the potential to be $250B in market cap in 5 years. Marvel has released billion-dollar grossing movies in rapid succession, something only previously done by Avatar and the Titanic.

And it was easy to see how finance — especially internet-native finance — could be included into those fringe communities.

Gamers and creators need to get paid — look at the success of Twitch and Patreon and OnlyFans.

And so the amalgamation of finance and internet cultures formed the meme-heavy environment that is crypto.

Pseudonymity is also incredibly important in crypto.

After all, the founder of crypto doesn’t even have a real name, Satoshi Nakomoto is a pseudonym for the individual/team behind the Bitcoin whitepaper.

Crypto is a movement that is grounded on privacy — privacy of data by having user-owned data, and privacy from third-parties accessing individual financial information.

So crypto folk had to turn to other ways of presenting their identity, and they leaned on the “atomic units of culture” and used internet-native icons as their digital face to the world — mainly to Discord and to Twitter.

People wanted to be Pepe the Frog as a derivatives trader

The SushiSwap team wanted to be reimagined as anime characters

Every crypto Discord has a #memes channel — for the culture of course.

The crypto community came up with words like HODL, bagholder, diamond hands, BTFD, and shill way before it was mainstream or even on r/wsb.

Memes became a form of identity — as well as communication and culture — for these crypto communities.

Coinsmart. Beste Bitcoin-Börse in Europa
Source: https://medium.com/nerd-for-tech/the-meme-ification-of-finance-c8237f55aa6c?source=rss——-8—————–cryptocurrency