Why Meme Coins Deserve a Second Act: Beyond Speculation to Utility

MoonPay’s leadership believes the meme coin phenomenon isn’t a failed experiment—it’s an unfinished one. The real innovation lies in how these tokens democratize value capture from cultural moments, a capability that will evolve far beyond today’s gambling-driven narratives.

The Attention Economy Needs a New Infrastructure

Modern digital life revolves around attention. Every scroll, share, and comment generates value that flows into the coffers of tech giants and venture-backed platforms. Yet ordinary creators and communities rarely capture the economic upside of the cultural moments they generate. This is where meme coins disrupt the existing order. According to Keith Grossman, president of MoonPay, these tokens solve a fundamental problem: how to quickly monetize cultural relevance at minimal cost. Where traditional finance requires gatekeepers, infrastructure, and capital deployment, meme coins compress that process into minutes.

The mechanism is elegant. Someone identifies a cultural moment or community interest. A token launches around that theme. Value flows directly to creators and early participants without intermediaries extracting rent along the way. This represents a genuine technological breakthrough—one that didn’t exist before blockchain enabled frictionless token creation.

Separating the Signal from the Noise

Critics rightfully point out that current meme coin implementations often function as gambling platforms, transferring wealth from uninformed retail traders to insiders and early adopters. This narrative isn’t wrong; it’s incomplete. Yes, many meme projects lack sustainable economics and legitimate utility. The current market environment certainly rewards speculation over fundamentals. But Grossman’s perspective suggests evaluating the underlying mechanism separately from its current misapplications.

Think of it this way: the internet enabled both information democratization and scam emails. The existence of spam didn’t invalidate email as a technology; it just meant the protocol needed better implementation.

The Path to Evolution

Grossman’s prediction—that meme coins will return in evolved form—suggests the current wave represents a prototype phase. Next-generation versions could retain the core innovation of low-cost attention tokenization while adding:

Sustainable Tokenomics: Current meme coins often lack meaningful economic incentives beyond price appreciation. Future iterations might tie tokens to actual revenue streams, community services, or creator compensation models.

Real Utility Integration: Tokens could function as membership passes to creator communities, governance tools for collaborative projects, or access keys to shared economies rather than pure speculation vehicles.

Governance Structures: More sophisticated DAO mechanisms could align incentives between founders, early adopters, and later participants, reducing the zero-sum wealth transfer dynamic.

What the Market Must Reckon With

Meme coins proved something important: people want to participate in capturing value from cultural moments. They want ownership stakes in communities. They want alternatives to gatekept financial systems. These aren’t desires that will disappear; they’re structural demands of digital-native populations.

The question isn’t whether attention tokenization matters. The question is what form it will take. Will projects figure out how to combine the accessibility and cultural resonance of meme coins with sustainable economic models? Or will the entire category remain trapped in the speculation-to-gambling cycle?

Market participants should watch for projects that genuinely attempt this synthesis. The intersection of creator economies, social platforms, and blockchain infrastructure remains wide open for experimentation. Today’s meme coin sector, flawed as it is, has proven the underlying demand exists.

If Grossman’s thesis holds, the next wave won’t look like Dogecoin derivatives. It will look like something we haven’t quite imagined yet—a system that preserves the democratization breakthrough while fixing the implementation failures.