Welcome to the golden age of creating asset bubbles

Compiled byRasheed Saleuddin

: Deep Tide TechFlow

A good speculative bubble can at least leave the infrastructure.

And our bubbles will only leave screenshots of price highlights, not even a cheap tulip bulb (17th-century Dutch tulip mania, even this early speculative bubble, at least with actual tulip bulbs as the target). Empty bubbles, only air remained, without the touch of any regulator. Moreover, it is addictive.

All of this exists in a crazy, influence-driven, behavior-frenzied world where euphoric self-aggrandizens take pride in making traditional investors uncomfortable with the worthless crypto assets they admire.

However, we seem willing to let insiders get risk-free returns every time, while latecomers get only risk without return on average and a lottery-like opportunity.

When headlines turn to investment

, Marshal McLuhan once said, "The medium is the message." A shooting made the news, and within a few hours, crypto players who hired influencers launched a memecoin called RIPCharlieKirk. This is one of more than 10,000 scams with the name "Charlie/Kirk". The coin started at a price near zero on September 10, closed the day close to $5 million, and then fell to about 1/15th of its peak. This is the product now: a code that can be screenshotted, no benefit, no value, just a name and a JPEG image.

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Source: Pump.fun

Evan Rademaker, a trader from Florida, told Bloomberg that he paid $30,000 to buy RIPCharlieKirk, ended up selling it at a loss of $17,000, and then chased after it and lost money again.

Promoters and paid promoters lit the fuse, and market sentiment and social media did the rest. Most of these tokens are already close to zero, and many will disappear. Those that barely survive are supported by "hope addiction" and the sunk cost fallacy, and early insiders have already profited from the exit.

Sometimes, "useless" is the whole meaning.

Useless Coin has skyrocketed 40x in just a few days and is still trading at a market cap close to $320 million. It has no practical use, which is exactly what a memecoin defines: a crypto token with no practical use cases.

Actually, Useless Coin has one purpose: to make insiders rich.

Despite the memecoin's short lifespan as a fruit fly, there are thousands of investors like Evan Rademaker ready to take another gamble through their Robinhood accounts or crypto wallets. Why?

Not all bubbles are created equal The

definition of soap bubbles is the air that fills the air we breathe. But asset price bubbles mean very different things.

We self-console ourselves with macroeconomic stories: stupid money will fund real things like canals, railroads, power utilities, Atlantic fiber, and maybe artificial intelligence next. Rocket boosters in bubbles are often true believers. And those that failed to succeed, such as Global Crossing, a former telecommunications giant that rose during the dot-com bubble and quickly declined after the bubble burst, becoming one of the largest corporate bankruptcies in U.S. history) can still provide a "slingshot effect" for society.

But lately, memecoins and memestocks have been in the limelight. The foam filled the air, leaving nothing behind. There is no infrastructure. There is no intellectual property that other Silicon Valley garage startups can take advantage of. No future business to restructure under Chapter 11 of the Bankruptcy Code. There are also finance companies, which hold only one asset that you can buy yourself and at a lower price.

This is nothing more than the transfer of wealth from outsiders to insiders. The asset itself is a joke, and the exit is the business: issue it to yourself and your friends for free, then promote it, and then sell it to bigger fools.

The supply of these wealth-destroying machines is easy to explain, and always has been.

History of stock manipulation Review

History is a record of stock gouging and selling.

• From Howe Street in the Vancouver Stock Exchange (VSE), which is filled with telemerchandising scam centers, to Stratton Oakmont in The Wolf of Wall Street.

• And then to the era of email spam, those "APPM TO A DOLLAR!! The email doubled or tripled a worthless stock before lunch and then plunged in half.

• Special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) sponsors make eight-figure profits, they make tens of millions, while the stocks they promote are down more than 99%. Virgin Galactic had a highlight moment when it sent Richard Branson into space, setting a brilliant record. Chamath, on the other hand, left with $315 million. Take a look at the performance of common shareholders:

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> Source: Yahoo Finance

The difference between those bubbles in the past and the bubbles of the present is that buyers in the past were "wronged". They can't see their ignorance clearly and firmly believe that what they buy has value. Some people have been imprisoned for this, and retail investors have generally learned some lessons - albeit temporarily.

Now that they're back, where is Chalmers?

Special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) are making a comeback, and now there are Crypto Treasury Companies, sometimes even both, such as Cantor Equity Partners, which once traded at 25 times its intrinsic value and has now returned to a fair price, down 96% from its highs. The company's main holdings in Bitcoin are at an all-time high.

: Yahoo Finance

Is the new meme the same as the old meme? Not

only are memestocks making a comeback, too. Entering the "meme 2.0" era, there are even some of the same traders. Keith Gill, aka Roaring Kitty, is back after three years on Memestock 1.0. But GameStop now has some fundamentals that anchor the price, making obvious manipulation more difficult.

As a result, the promoters adapted to the changes. Nowadays, "investment" itself is designed to be worthless, so that there is no debate about intrinsic value.

New crypto memecoins are born every day, sometimes 100 and sometimes 1000. Even the White House was involved. Initially issued for less than $1, $TRUMP soared to over $40 before falling back to the ground. Insiders still get about 8x gains. The Trump family cashed out about $350 million early. It can be called an "upgrade" for SPACs and treasury companies.

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Source: Coingecko.com

Such stories are repeated time and time again on major coin-issuing platforms in the crypto space. On Solana's Pump.fun platform, multiple analyses by Dune show that over 60% of wallets are in the red, only 0.4% are in profit over $10,000, and 81% of tokens are down more than 90% from their all-time highs. This is even superior to SPACs when it comes to wealth loss – both in terms of volume and proportion.

However, the industry ethical standards for coin issuance are concerning. Solidus Labs revealed that 98.6% of Pump.fun project launches and 93% of Raydium pools exhibit signs of fraud.

Still, scams like $TRUMP stand tall. There are also MELANIA, as well as LIBRA, where 86% of traders lost a total of $251 million. Dogecoin (DOGE), SHIB, and a few other multi-billion dollar memecoins are still active. We are in the third surge of Dogecoin, with a market capitalization of $40 billion. Will the third time be the lucky one? While $TRUMP still has a market capitalization of more than $1.5 billion.

Many bubbles are small in size and disappear quickly, like the aforementioned fruit flies. Most tokens can't even break $1 million in market capitalization. Here are some recent examples, like Bonk.fun's $FUNLESS, that look like it can give investors as little "fun" as $USELESS's "uses." This is really a model of "advertising is the truth".

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Source: Bonk.fun

Even small bubbles can be very profitable. For example, one of the students I mentored gave up consulting this summer to launch and "dump" the Solana memecoin.

Bigger fools, when encountering stronger dopamine,

why buy from insiders when the price skyrockets? It's not because everyone is deceived. Many buyers are well aware that these tokens have no real value, but their motivations for buying include the following:

• Momentum/bigger fool theory: Seize the uptrend and try to exit before the music stops. Sometimes it works.

• Ignorance: Some people really believe these stories. What?

• But more of a gambling addiction:

  • small bets (unit bias on tokens priced at just $0.0000030);

  • Immediate "return" (if the life cycle is as short as a fly);

  • lottery bias (a 20-to-1 chance occasionally leads to a 20x return);

  • Addictive, gamified user experience (zero commissions, one-click redemption, round-the-clock dopamine stimulation);

  • Social identity and "fear of missing out (FOMO)" (Can you resist not participating in the next round with someone in your group chat who has achieved "life-changing gains" through $MELANIA? ）。

Without selling, there is no skyrocketing

Yes, these small bubbles do have a "reason". But why are they still so common when so many people are losing so much money?

The point is that we need to "sell". Because those chances of narrow success light up the same brain circuits as slots. Intermittent rewards keep people pulling leverage. And there are always enough winners to refill the pond. Once one opportunity disappears, another takes its place. The sell-off is the fuel for the next surge. If everyone can make a profit (like NVIDIA), there won't be a new gamble saying let's play another game.

Like sports betting, you lose, and often lose. Sports gamblers are aware of this harsh reality, and so are crypto memecoin players.

But there are always new tables, new currencies, new codes. Society pays for this: dopamine debt and financial nihilism. If you need a down payment on a housing, the lottery bias seems reasonable: $1,000 in an index fund won't change much for years; And a 100x return at a time may be realized tomorrow.

Lack of value is a feature, not a flaw,

and modern foam requires buyers to be willing to participate knowing that they are waving the air. Real business has a ceiling and the gravitational pull of cash flow. While memecoins do not. If the only "fundamentals" are later buyers, then the limit to the rise depends only on the influence of "well-known people" and the half-life of the joke.

Insiders, market makers, and trading platforms always prioritize profit. But later buyers were not deceived. This is not an investment and has nothing to do with the compound annual growth rate (CAGR). It's about 10x or 100x chance at a time. If you succeed, you have a down payment. If it fails, there is another opportunity to skyrocket tomorrow.

Old gambling, meeting new gambling

casinos used to have chips, drinks and carpets. Today, the casino is right in your phone, with a dazzling user interface and social feeds. Expected earnings have not improved, but delivery methods have changed. We replaced the velvet rope with push notifications (a sign used by traditional casinos to divide areas and control entry, representing the physical threshold to enter the world of gambling).

Casinos need more and more betting options. Wall Street insiders and crypto players are adept at providing these options.

We transform financialized memes into meme-based finance. Crypto, stocks, sports betting, and even betting on who will be the next president – it's all the same. Every minute, every day, there is a game to participate in. Quick results and chase the next opportunity.

This also explains why crypto/stock platform Robinhood withdrew on the same day it entered the S&P 500, while Caesars Entertainment withdrew. On that day, the two were like two ships crisscrossing at night, with Caesars having a market capitalization of just $5.3 billion and Robinhood already exceeding $100 billion. And on October 7, ICE, the world's largest futures exchange, announced its investment in sports betting and prediction market pioneer Polymarket.

The money is there. Because every day, every transaction, seems to be shouting "Las Vegas". And "better".

Ethics (if that's ethical)

Past bubbles have mispriced projects, but occasionally unexpectedly pushed them forward. And today's meme-driven, low-liquidity, options hype frenzy is mostly about mispricing claims and building exit channels. They transfer wealth in a dramatic way, leaving behind a highlight video. Insiders start from scratch and always make money. Like a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC). Just like the speculative workshops and boiler rooms of the past, except now these actions are legal.

Outsiders are just playing a game of "whack-a-mole".

Sounds pretty good. Until you realize it's an addiction. It brings all the harms of other forms of gambling, but it also signals our failure in the financial world.