This Token’s Got Back

We try to make learning about the emerging frontiers of the internet fun, which means our focus on utility is always at risk of veering into cultural hype. But every once in a while, the two coalesce, and we are happy.

At the intersection of the culture and utility today is $mother. We’ve long-teased my bullishness on this particular meme coin, but it’s high time I gave it a proper deep dive. After all, $DOGE is getting a federal department named after it, so it may not be long before there’s no distinction between culture and utility whatsoever.

$mother is Australian rapper Iggy Azalea’s cult favorite token. (A cult of adonitology, to be specific.) It launched at the end of May and ran to a quarter billion dollar market cap, then ran to more than $140M again at the end of September, when she announced plans for three projects that would utilize the token for their payment mechanism.

The first of these is set to launch before the end of the month. The token’s market cap has been oscillating between $45M and $75M for weeks now, with more holders and marketplace partnerships coming online every day. Now, I’m a data science nerd, not a finance bro, so I don’t really do TA. (And I certainly, explicitly, Do Not Give Investment Advice™.) But as a casual cultural critic and market observer, it does seem to me like $mother is poised for a run.

Post-election, the broader crypto space has gone full-on raging bull, which I think could persist for the next year or so at least. Granted, that rising tide will definitely not lift all ships. Much like NFTs, most memecoin projects are rug pulls, or pump and dumps in TradFi terms. But there are such things as blue-chip memecoins. Just look at $DOGE. Launched in 2018 and a staple since 2021, Dogecoin’s legion of rabid fans has helped the movement maintain its momentum. It was just listed in Coinbase’s Crypto Index product, which gives a cursory glance at the state of the crypto economy. The Trump administration’s memetic nod to $DOGE may be absurd on the surface, but if they were going to throw a bone to crypto bros, Dogecoin has earned its spot as a logical choice.

When it comes to memecoins, the “utility” really comes down to the community around the token. How well can it hold your attention, and for how long? I have faith in Azalea’s bonafides as a performer and public figure to carry her far on that front, and her persistence is already proving effective at earning the token more unique holders, plenty of active traders, and perhaps most importantly, promoters shilling the token across the web.

Maybe some actual utility will surface when those projects go live. Maybe not. But while I’d prefer to talk exclusively about utility, it’s impossible to deny, the price action today is with the memes. And that’s because the current longtail of crypto participants (or at least the ones we engage with on Twitter) appear more concerned with chasing wealth than leveraging revolutionary technology to change the state of our society. But hey. At least it gives me plenty of content to vent about from this soapbox.

—El Prof