Memecoins such as Doge and Shiba Inu are often ridiculed by the crypto community, mainly over the perception that these coins are highly volatile and are not serious crypto currencies. Accused of being designed to draw in gamblers and part the vulnerable from their money, the view is that no sensible crypto investor should plan to retire on such an investment. In short, they are all going to zero! Ironic, given that in the not-too-distant past trad-fi warriors directed these types of comments at Bitcoin.

Well, as it turns out, plenty of dogmatic speculators have done exactly this! With recent gains of 3,400%, reaching all-time highs and outstripping demand for Bitcoin, copy-dog coin Shiba Inu has made plenty of their SHIB Army a.k.a 'vulnerable speculators' rich enough to retire many times over. As has Doge coin.

Dogs 1: Cynics: 0

I can’t help thinking that these meme-cynics are somehow missing the point.

In a recent interview with Scott Melker on the Wolf of All Streets podcast, economist and crypto analyst Alex Kruger, commented that "we should just accept that the market has an appreciation for memes. The world changed...buy them or don't!". He has a point. "Honest" meme coins don't pretend to be anything other than what they are. But if they aren't an investment, a currency, or a store of value, it begs the question, what is their value?

For the memecoins that have made it, we have seen their profile and value raised from obscurity to celebrity status on not much more than the strength of their communities. In the case of joke-coin Doge, the community developed its utility by finding a collective stride and power. Over the past few years, 1.7 million 'subshibers' to r/dogecoin Reddit group have raised thousands of Dollars for numerous charity projects, sent a Jamaican bobsleigh team to the Sochi Winter Olympics, reimbursed fellow community members who suffered losses through hacking and collected a few celebrity fans along the way.

Community members interact with each other online on a daily basis and don't take themselves too seriously. Likewise their coin, with its Shiba Inu dog meme, represents the intrinsic value of that culture to its members. As the positive community engagement increased monumentally, the value of the coin also increased monumentally, to the benefit of all who invested time and energy in it, as well as money.

In much the same way that Bitcoin digitises the store of value and NFT's digitise the ownership of value, we should consider that memecoins digitise community value. The price is a gauge of social engagement. High monetary returns make intangible good feeling very tangible and creates a positive cycle.

Value is something, as a Trustee, I deal with every day. There is so much more to intergenerational wealth transfer than transferring physical assets to the next generation. These days, when overnight billionaires seem to be plentiful, it is easy to forget that most high net worth clients are successful due to their values. There aren't many entrepreneurs who manage to escape challenging times during their during their wealth creation journey. Those that win often do so because they are more persistent, hard working, and dedicated than the rest. They are fearless and keep going despite the setbacks.

When speaking to clients it is often these kind of values they wish above all to transmit to their children, who invariably experience a very different life journey than they did. How to use family resources to engage the next generation in this way is one of the more interesting and enjoyable challenges of our Trustee role. It is, however, fun to to think we could in the future 'hack' this challenge by simply minting a family 'fearlessness, hard work and dedication' meme coin to achieve it?