Degens Part 2: The Mainstreaming of Crypto & the Madness of the Memes
Mar. 04, 2025.
19 mins. read.
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Is crypto still the rebel’s playground, or has it been tamed by the mainstream? Gordon Grant unpacks the madness of memes, state-backed coins, and the shifting crypto ethos.
Interview with Gordon Grant
In one of the videos in Degens: Down and Out in the Crypto Casino, Gordon Grant stands by the bull on Wall Street and gives a little rap about how the bull is a meme, just like the image on a memecoin. The bull is a meme that is believed to represent logic, consistency and some appreciation on investment over time. It is understood to be reliable despite the temporary ebbs and flows of the market. Cryptocurrency has represented something else. A lot of meme coin holders are acting on a different desire, in his words, a desire to “flip the bird to finance, to rationality, to coherence.”
Speaking in 2024, he characterized its extremity by saying, “they can suddenly catch up violently in unexpected ways. And so you hold them again in a mathematically heuristic sense, not because you think of day-to-day expectations, but because one day they could go up 100×. And that’s how they behave. That’s how they’re distributed. They don’t follow a bell curve. They don’t follow any curve at all. They could do nothing for a decade, and then they could go up 10,000% overnight.”
In this interview we explore the nature of the crypto beast, and how it has been changing in response to going mainstream, the enthusiastic participation of various state actors (the more eccentric ones) and other ins and outs of what the makers of the Degens movie call “the crypto casino.”

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