Follow the Money: The Memecoin Economy

**Sam Fenwick** (0:00)
Type the words meme coin investor into YouTube, and this is what comes back.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:05)
I've turned $3,000 into over $3 million trading meme coins.

**Carol Alexander** (0:09)
This guy made $73 million from PP, the meme coin.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:13)
This dude made $6 million from P, not the scroll token.

**Sam Fenwick** (0:16)
And today, I'm going to try... As you scroll down, the figures that people are quoting seem unbelievable.

**SPEAKER_4** (0:21)
They just skyrocketed, and then they dumped, but I was so fast because I know how to...

**Sam Fenwick** (0:26)
There's a lot here on how to invest, how to grow, and how to make a million. But you don't have to scroll too far before you see stories of those who have lost money on meme coins.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:37)
In reality, the $10,000 I invested turned into $121.

**Sam Fenwick** (0:43)
So where does the money actually go? Who wins? Who loses? I'm Sam Fenwick, and this is Business Daily from the BBC World Service. Today, we're following the money behind meme coins, the crypto currency anyone can launch, including a president.
Cast your mind back to January 2025, a cold night in Washington DC and preparations underway to welcome a new president. Three days before he took office, Donald Trump posted that he had a meme coin. A meme coin is a cryptocurrency built around a joke, an internet meme, something out of pop culture, whatever's going around that week. There's no company behind it, no product, no promise anyone has to keep, just a name, a picture and a price. On the 1st of July this year, the president's annual financial disclosure was published, 927 pages of it. It showed more than $1.4 billion in income last year from cryptocurrency, 635 million of it in royalties from a company called Celebration Coins, thought to be the entity behind the coin he launched three days before he took office. The White House says the president is not profiteering from the presidency. His businesses are held in a trust run by his sons, and he isn't the subject of federal conflict of interest laws.
So when you buy one of these coins, where does your money actually go?
First, let's find out how the coins get made. Carol Alexander is a professor of finance at the University of Sussex in the UK. She wanted to know how hard it actually is, so she tried it.

**Carol Alexander** (2:36)
It took me 25 seconds. I used GPT and I just said, make me a meme coin, and I made up some meme about the football player Bellingham. Most of these are just a name. So if I just made one called Bellingham, lots of young British people would probably think, oh, that's one to watch. It starts off with a price of something like one hundredth of a cent.

**Sam Fenwick** (2:58)
Now, Carol didn't launch her new Bellingham coin, but if she had, here's what happens next.

**Carol Alexander** (3:04)
Once it's put on the blockchain, the smart contract will automatically deal out mint, mint, mint, mint, mint, mint these tokens up to the maximum, which is usually something like a million or it could be a hundred million.
And you will probably retain quite a few of them yourself, maybe half a million of the one million minted. And through socials, you pump up the price and then when the price gets high enough, usually you'll sell as many as you can and then the price will fall, which is why most of them only survive a few hours or days.

**Sam Fenwick** (3:45)
Can anyone make a meme coin? Is there any vetting? Is there any regulation behind it?

**Carol Alexander** (3:51)
No, there's no vetting, no regulation and there can't be because it's on the blockchain and nobody can regulate blockchains because they're not domiciled anywhere.

**Sam Fenwick** (4:02)
So they get made constantly. Producer Matt is here. He's watching a site called GMGN and it tracks new meme coins as they launch. Matt, what are you seeing?

**Matt Lines** (4:14)
Yeah, I've been tracking this since the start of the show.
Over 100 meme coins, coming up to 120, 130 meme coins been created since we started recording. I'm now looking at what I've got in front of me. There's references to things like Pokemon. There's animals named, you know, there's a Leo the Lion I saw earlier. There is one which is just called N Boss and someone with a hoodie. It's all random stuff from the internet. People just post every few seconds, hoping that it will take off.

**Sam Fenwick** (4:48)
So about 130 in what, less than five minutes or so?

**Matt Lines** (4:52)