Efrain Smith

On memecoins… Memecoins have generated a lot of buzz recently, and I’ve gotten some questions on how I think about them. I am personally not a memecoin trader (beyond a few test trades), but they’ve become hugely popular. Arguably, they've been with us since the beginning – Dogecoin is still one of the most popular coins. Even Bitcoin is somewhat of a memecoin (one could argue so is the U.S. dollar, once it was disconnected from gold). Just like the early days of the internet with animated gifs, new technologies often look like a toy but evolve into something much more powerful over time. So we should be open minded about where memecoins are going, even if some are silly, offensive, or even fraudulent today. Memecoins are a canary in the coal mine that everything will be tokenized and brought onchain (every post, image, video, song, asset class, user identity, vote, artwork, stablecoin, contract etc). Coinbase differentiates itself by being the most trusted and easiest to use platform in crypto, so how are we approaching memecoins through this lens? From first-principles, we believe in free market capitalism. If our customers want it, and it's legal, we aim to let them make that choice for themselves. But it's our job to provide them with the best information we can find to make an informed choice. If a token is a scam or fraudulent, we'd want to remove it. But if it's just low quality, the customer should be able to see reviews or community notes, and make their own choice. (Defining what is an outright scam vs low quality is often a blurry line btw, so you need to be careful not to accidentally create a censorship regime.) We want to provide useful information to consumers, not play judge and jury or endorse/recommend investments. Some memecoins have clearly gone too far lately, to the extent people are insider trading. This is illegal, and people should understand that you will go to prison for this. In every crypto cycle, there is a get rich quick crowd that comes and goes, and learns this lesson the hard way. Don't break the law! And don't try to get rich quick. You should get rich by contributing real lasting value to society (or at least be trying - it's not easy!). So where do we go from here? We should purge the bad actors and lift up the people trying to build lasting value. We want to bring the next billion users onchain, and the only way to do this is to build products and services which people want. Help them earn a living, avoid high fees when sending money to friends and family, find truth about what's happening in the world, or get a loan to grow their business. Give them access to sound money and financial infrastructure, to accelerate progress in the world. Memecoins have a role to play here, and I think will evolve to help artists get paid, track trends, or who knows what - it's too early to say, but we should keep exploring. Keep building with this long term mindset, and make something people want.