The next era of crypto

Memecoins are fusing with popular culture and their influence will grow, says crypto pioneer Olaf Carlson-Wee.

It’s easy to write off memecoins—cryptocurrencies tied to internet trends that have little underlying purpose—as the worst type of crypto gambling. But look a little closer and it’s possible to see memecoins as part of an emerging new information ecosystem, says Olaf Carlson-Wee, founder of one of the very first crypto VC firms and the featured guest on the newest episode of Fortune’s Crypto Playbook vodcast (available on Spotify, Apple, and YouTube).

Carlson-Wee is worth heeding as he’s been early to many of the most significant developments in crypto. That includes writing his thesis on Bitcoin way back in 2012 and, after a stint as a lumberjack, joining Coinbase as its first employee. He left the company in 2016, back in the early days of Ethereum and smart contracts, to start Polychain Capital.

On the vodcast, he shared his views on where the industry is going next. That included weighing on the recent proliferation of memecoins, which have taken off thanks to sites like Pump.fun, which make it simple for anyone to launch a cryptocurrency.

The vast majority of these coins are worthless, both for practical purposes and as an object of speculation. But plenty have a market cap of more than $1 million, and some like Dogecoin are even worth tens of billions. More significantly, Carlson-Wee notes, is that all the memecoins taken together are beginning to put a stamp on popular culture.

“There’s a very fascinating behavior where, every time a new news event or meme gets created, just anything that’s like viral on social media or on the internet, you immediately see a coin sort of launched and attached to it,” he said, pointing to example of a person who learned of the death of Pope Francis through a memecoin.

Carlson-Wee observed that, in the future, it’s easy to imagine a world where memecoins become a type of content and, based on the activity of traders, become part of an organic social media feed. For many in the crypto world and beyond, this could be an attractive alternative to the current system where people are force-fed content based on the algorithms of large tech companies.

“These new like meme coins sort of act as the information discovery system for the cutting edge of information markets,” said Carlson-Wee. “In social media, you could have every post be a coin, right? I do think this is a bit where we’re headed.”

The Polychain founder also weighed in on other emerging trends that are likely to become part of the fabric of crypto.

On the intersection of crypto and AI, Carlson-Wee observed that blockchains represent a natural substrate for deploying agents. That’s because traditional software systems are largely incapable of autonomous transactions, while blockchains can use smart contracts to achieve this.

“[Agents] can enter into contracts using software or math like smart contracts on blockchains, they can own assets in crypto wallets, and they can transact with real people or other agents using crypto wallets,” he noted.