Cryptocurrencies that were once launched as a joke are increasingly seeing sharp increases in value, prompting investors to explore opportunities to make money from them. We are talking about billions of dollars, and large hedge funds are getting into the game, writes the Financial Times.
Image source: Ilnur Kalimullin / unsplash.com
A month ago, the Internet community was outraged when New York authorities needlessly euthanized a squirrel named Peanut suspected of spreading rabies. As public outrage spread at a viral pace, the PNUT cryptocurrency, named after the animal, rose in price from $0.1 to $2.27 in a few days, and its capitalization exceeded $2 billion. Thus, the PNUT coin became the fastest growing memecoin in history, surpassing even Musk’s favorite Dogecoin.
And PNUT is not alone: against the backdrop of the election of the US President, who promised the cryptocurrency community the support of Donald Trump, other memecoins also took off. These include MOO DENG (named after the popular online pygmy hippopotamus), 888 (reflecting the Chinese symbol of good luck), POPCAT, dogwifhat, and CHILLGUY (related to the relaxed cartoon dog meme that went viral on TikTok and more).
This week, Bitcoin surpassed $100,000 for the first time in history, perhaps because Trump nominated Paul Atkins, a known proponent of laissez faire in the cryptocurrency industry, to head the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). In addition, the US financial system is so “overflowing with liquidity” that the crowd is capable of creating such effects, experts believe: in practice, memcoins are almost never used, but the information ecosystem is increasingly influencing the financial and political spheres. Three years ago, a consensus among retail investors in the online community sparked a surge in GameStop and AMC. The administration of the elected US President talks a lot about freedom of speech at any cost, which means that such effects will only intensify. And no one will try to stop Elon Musk when he again contributes to the growth of the price of the DOGE cryptocurrency with his messages on the social network X.
Modern investors can only begin to track these information flows. Large hedge funds have already begun to use digital analysis to gauge changes in online sentiment; social monitoring tools are being developed at Bloomberg. A group of cyber analysts founded the company Narravance, which initially studied the state propaganda of countries unfriendly to the United States, but now it has a product called Chatterflow – it helps retail and institutional investors track the growth of viral noise around certain stocks, and soon it will begin to work with digital assets. There will undoubtedly be other startups in this area. That is, the Internet is changing both politics and financial markets, and investors and regulators should get used to the idea that squirrel memes are no longer just jokes.