The financialization of crypto is certainly worth celebrating.
Institutions, ETFs, compliant capital, and traditional finance are all entering the market, making its liquidity and infrastructure more mature.
But not every player from the old guard is necessarily benefiting.
For crypto-native users in particular, a more regulated market also means fewer opportunities to profit from information asymmetries, emotional swings, and high volatility.
That’s why an interesting phenomenon has emerged:
There are more and more memes—and more and more people trading them.
Everyone knows memes aren’t good investments: the odds are stacked against you, and many projects are outright schemes designed to fleece retail investors. So why does demand for speculation keep growing?
Because memes may be precisely where traditional financialization has the hardest time reaching.
They don’t need institutional backing or polished fundamentals. Their prices depend more on attention, consensus, and sentiment.
As mainstream assets become more formalized, the room for crypto-native players to operate actually shrinks, and speculative demand starts looking for new outlets.
So the meme boom isn’t necessarily a rejection of crypto’s financialization.
It may be the other side of the coin:
As the main table becomes more respectable, the speculative demand pushed out of it heads to another, wilder table.
A healthier market doesn’t mean it becomes easier for everyone to make money.
Institutions, ETFs, compliant capital, and traditional finance are all entering the market, making its liquidity and infrastructure more mature.
But not every player from the old guard is necessarily benefiting.
For crypto-native users in particular, a more regulated market also means fewer opportunities to profit from information asymmetries, emotional swings, and high volatility.
That’s why an interesting phenomenon has emerged:
There are more and more memes—and more and more people trading them.
Everyone knows memes aren’t good investments: the odds are stacked against you, and many projects are outright schemes designed to fleece retail investors. So why does demand for speculation keep growing?
Because memes may be precisely where traditional financialization has the hardest time reaching.
They don’t need institutional backing or polished fundamentals. Their prices depend more on attention, consensus, and sentiment.
As mainstream assets become more formalized, the room for crypto-native players to operate actually shrinks, and speculative demand starts looking for new outlets.
So the meme boom isn’t necessarily a rejection of crypto’s financialization.
It may be the other side of the coin:
As the main table becomes more respectable, the speculative demand pushed out of it heads to another, wilder table.
A healthier market doesn’t mean it becomes easier for everyone to make money.