We Made a Memecoin
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A quick note before we get started. Nothing we say in this episode is investment or financial advice. It is meant purely for educational purposes. All right, here's the show. Tish, hi, how are you? Hi, I'm great, Lizzie. How about yourself? Do you know why we brought you into the studio today? I hear that there's a new currency dropping. Yeah.

A few weeks ago, we did something a little weird for our show. Something that our producers, Evan Campbell and Patrick Fort and I, have been working on for a while. So I would like to show you something that we made. I would like your honest feedback. This is something that Evan and Patrick made. I was just vaguely present. Okay.

Here goes. All right. Welcome to Boing Wom. Wow. This is an incredible image. That's our landing page. Oh my God. We made our own meme coin. Its name is Boing Wom. And what Tish was looking at there was our AI-generated art with a cartoon worm coming out of the side of a generic-looking politician's head.

We batted around this idea for almost a month, starting when we made a show about President Trump's meme coin. That one's just called Trump. It was kind of a joke at first. But then, a few weeks later, we decided to make it real. Or as real as Dogecoin, Pepe, or any other meme coin.

Would you like to buy some Buen Wum? I will happily buy some Buen Wum. I will happily support this project. I could get a lot of Buen Wum with just a few dollars. Why not? You know? Turns out we have quite a bit available. The thing about a meme coin is it has no intrinsic value.

It's a made-up asset, a digital collectible, really, and its worth is determined by how many people you can get to buy into it because they think the meme is funny or cool. Think of it as the crypto version of a penny stock, just thousands of a penny.

It may sound silly, but it's a huge business in crypto. Pump.fun, which is a meme coin marketplace that launched last year, has seen some 13 million users launch nearly 8 million new coins. And some of those coins have had remarkable success, like the meme coin FWOG, which reached a market cap of roughly $75 million.

You've probably heard about people investing in a meme coin that blows up overnight and they are instantly rich. Or about how meme coins are not only easy to invest in, but also to create. We wanted to see how easy it really was. Our coin, Buenwum, is brainworm but in baby speak. We'll explain the baby thing later. But right now, you could go on PumpFun and buy Buenwum.

We also made an X account to promote the coin and a website for curious investors. That's B-W-A-I-N-W-U-H-M dot com, by the way. I showed it to Natish.

The very first thing I'm seeing, it's a boing one with a little dollar sign in front of it. I think everyone here now knows what that means. There is an auto-generated image from Google's Gemini at the top with John Bureaucrat with a big brain worm sticking out his head.

It's a meme coin with a purpose, they say. Yeah, that's our descriptor. Yeah, but it's not just another meme coin. It's a movement. It's dedicated to raising awareness for people with worms in their brains. Wow. You know, I think this is a great cause. I think this is a wonderful, wonderful idea right now because let's be honest, I think everyone would agree there's too many brain worms these days. We have a lot of brain worms.

Do we look like Marx? Do we look like we know what we're doing? Or do we look like we have worms in our brain?

I think you look no different than any other person who tries out like some of these meme coins, you know, you're probably a lot less boisterous than some of the people who are like really actively pumping and scamming out there. But this sort of thing has happened with so many names and so many just like different brands. I can't even count now. They're probably like

millions of languishing meme coins out there in the ether. No pun intended. But I think what we look like are just a pair of budding traders looking to get in the game. And get into the game we did. This was our one shot to make bank off the meme coin craze. Today on the show, people are getting rich on meme coins. Can we do it too?

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None of the three of us, me or my producers Patrick or Evan, had dabbled much in crypto. We've covered it a lot on the show, from the fall of FTX to the industry's support for Trump to the president's various crypto entanglements. But we weren't really investors ourselves. We were investors of the Fed.

Which is a long way of saying we had no idea what we were doing. So we looked for a guide, someone who knows the industry and could help shepherd us through this journey. And we found one in Azeem Khan. He's an advisor to UNICEF's crypto fund. He co-created a blockchain called Morph. And he's been around the industry for more than a decade.

Yeah, I started writing about Bitcoin for the Huffington Post at the end of 2013. So the NYC Bitcoin Center was opening in the financial district. I went to a party that they hosted for New Year's Eve at the end of 2013. I didn't really know if it had a purpose in staying, but then when I went to this event and I saw a bunch of people trading Bitcoin for like 600 bucks using QR codes while they were all drunk, for some reason, I was just like,

Like, these people aren't going to go away. Azeem even launched his own meme coin. Though it was so long ago, they weren't really a thing yet. Early 2014, my first attempt at doing anything in crypto of my own was something called Kimcoindashian. Oh, my God. Did you make money off of Kimcoindashian? Not a dollar. So we are planning...

To make a meme coin, God help us. And a big reason that we wanted to talk to you was like to try to understand how to make it successful or at the very least, like the best practices. Like I understand that we are talking about an asset that is essentially made up. But from your vantage point, like what makes a successful meme coin? A lot more than people realize.

Traditionally, if you actually really want to launch a meme coin in a way that you think will be able to generate a certain amount of success, you would put together a

Something called a light paper, which is basically like a short version of a business plan. What's in it? You talk about why you're launching this, what you think it can be used for. You sort of sell a grand vision. Most importantly, Azeem says, is something called the tokenomics. That's the universe behind the scenes. How many coins there will be, how they'll be distributed, and who will invest in the coin and help promote it.

Then there are events, giveaways, influencers and celebrities to help promote the coin, etc., etc. Most of that is pretty pricey. And we had none of that. All right. I want to break this down in a couple of different ways. We do not have a lot of money. One of our producers has got like a hundred bucks in Solana in a phantom wallet.

We are trying to talk our bosses into giving us a little bit more money for this experiment. How much do we need? So the team that raised money for the Hawk Tua coin back in November that launched with Hayley Welch had done, I believe, $12.5 million total for their raise.

We're not going to have that. Are you sure? I'm pretty sure. We have three journalists. Yeah, no, we're toast. Yeah. And that's the reality of this. And I think it's what, you know, I've written about meme coins multiple times. I've been quoted and wired about meme coins, been quoted in The Block and some other publications. And part of the reason I like to talk about it is because I think it's unfair that so many people don't actually know what they're getting into it.

What I hear you saying is that there's basically no way for me and two producers to make money doing this thing. Yeah, more or less. I think that that would be a correct conclusion. So we took Azeem's brutal honesty, sat with it for a bit, and decided to do this anyway. We got on a Zoom to figure out our plan. And we want to be clear here. Even with Azeem's advice...

we were, to some extent, winging it. This coin better work because it's bad out there. I'm kind of baking everything up. Like crypto's our future? I got nothing else going on, I'll tell you that. Yeah. If we could just get rich quick, that would solve a lot of our problems. If you have never been on a meme coin site like Pumpfun, I need you to imagine some of the most deranged memes possible.

We saw like five different Pepe the Frogs. Some were so offensive and Nazi-coded, I'm not even going to say their names out loud. And then there's the baby thing. Lots of images of politicians with baby faces. One of the most popular coins right now is Pweez, which has like an AI picture of a baby JD Vance wearing a propeller hat. As of this recording, it has a market cap of $13 million.

It sounds to me like our best bet is to sort of lean into the general culture behind this. I think if we want this to be successful, which we do, we might have to just try and find some sort of meme within this space that is not so inherently offensive and so bad and just sort of still will tickle the people that are on this site or the people who would interact with this stuff in the first place. Official little Marco Rubio. Oh! Baby RFK Jr.,

Do something about vaccines. Oh, I like baby RFQ juniors pretty good. Mm-hmm.

A picture of him going in to get his shots. Baby R.K. Jr. getting vaccinated? That could be good. Would we get sued? I don't know. That's a good question. Wait, what if it was Wayne Wum? Yes, I like that. That's a good one. Instead of an R in the worm, I think it would be W-O-W-M? W-B-W-A-N-E. We could work out the particulars offline.

Obviously, we have lost our minds. But as a reminder, the correct spelling of our coin, Buenwum, is B-W-A-I-N-W-U-H-M. Then we took Azim's advice and Evan made a website.

My coding skills, my Squarespace skills are very, they're lacking. That's not my expertise. Patrick wrote the slightly bananas description of our coin for the Pump Fund site. Get Boi and Wom from the depths and to the top of the charts with your investment. We can take Boi and Wom to the White House, Washington, and beyond. Buy Boi and Wom now. Obviously, we needed to inject some AI madness into this process.

We used Google's Gemini to create our logo, an image of a generic middle-aged white guy with a cartoon worm coming out of his brain. Then we asked ChatGPT to drum up website copy for us. We had our ex-account, Telegram channel, and drafted some more promotional posts. And then came launch day. Evan and Patrick met up to launch the coin on PumpFun.

At the start of this, we had roughly $90 worth of a coin called Sol, Solana, but the value of the coins can change wildly. We ended up spending about half of what we had to launch BrainWarm. Executing transaction. Executing transaction. Confirm transaction.

So we're going to get 17,590,163.93 of Buenum corn when I make this. And we're giving up 0.52689 Solana, which roughly... That's exactly how much I wanted to spend. Market cap of $4,020. $4,000 and falling. Rapidly falling. Okay.

Coin launched. Weight off our shoulders. Oh, but there is so much more to come. After the break, we enter the scammy world of meme coin promoters.

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I'm going to be honest. Things did not look good out of the gate. At launch, Boehm's market cap, the total value of all the coins available, was $4,200. The

A few people bought our coin on PumpFun. Then they sold. And by the end of the first day, Buenwum had fallen to a market cap of $3,700. But were we deterred? No. We are in this to do something. So Evan headed to Telegram, a messaging platform that's popular with crypto folks, where he was immediately inundated with phone calls from strangers trying to help promote Buenwum.

We launched the coin and my telegram is just flooded. People asking me what my current market cap is. What's the plan for our project? Is your project legit? Do you need calls for promotion? Somebody just said greetings with a Bitcoin gif. Andrew from Nigeria sent me a note saying, how about we cooperate in getting you? Oh, Chang is calling me right now. Do I pick this up?

I'm not, I'm not going to pick this up. I can't do that. It is insane. Man, I am constantly getting messages from people asking me if they want a pump. Kang is calling me again, dude. That's wild. While Evan was freaking out on Telegram, Patrick went over to X. Azeem had told us that getting a KOL, or Key Opinion Leader, to promote your coin is really important.

You can think of KOLs as kind of the Jim Cramers of the crypto world. Stocks should be sold and sold aggressively. Sell, sell, sell! Sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell

People with screen names like The Crypto Devil, CZ Real Army, and my personal favorite, The Coin Pump. Obviously, they seem shady, but hey, what the hell? Why not? They wanted to help promote our coin and potentially scam other people if they got paid themselves. Did we want a rug pull, aka a pump and dump for Boing Woong? We had several offers. They did not inspire confidence.

Yeah, sure. I can help many projects to grow their market value and earn big. In past time, I have my best shill team, Rocketship. Two type of earning in this coin system. One is rug pull. Once you get buyers, just get out your all money. Second is long-term investment. Slowly increase investment and earn big, Rocketship.

And then there were people who somehow seemed even shadier, including an ex-user who went by Crypto Alexander, whose profile picture looked like an AI-generated version of Ryan Gosling surrounded by Bitcoin. He offered to post about our coin on his ex-account, which has more than 50,000 followers, for 20 bucks, which was almost all the money we had left over for promotion.

We sent him a tweet to share with his followers. Here's our post. Okay, fine. But I've sent you two accounts. I want you to post on them too. This will benefit you a lot. Do I have to pay for them? Just do this for them. Just give me $30 and I'll post the pin for the two accounts. Because I really enjoyed working with you. Just send me $30 and I'll post on both these accounts and pin them. We had already paid Crypto Alexander $20. He wanted more. How about $15? $15.

Brother, I'm talking about $30. It will be posted on two accounts and the pin will be posted in 24 hours. This is also only for you. Can you make our tweet on your account first and then I will talk with my partner about sending you more money? I'm not posting because of this. I'm saying that when you post on all three accounts at once, it will have a lot of benefits. You will get a lot of results and all the attraction will come to you. Okay, but I sent you $20 to make a tweet for us already.

Yes, sir, I've received your payment. Please send me $30. It makes $40 for two accounts. Please send me $30. I'll post the pin on them. It is okay. Please send me $30 within 24 hours. Just imagine what kind of results you will get when posting on three accounts at once. Bro, I'm waiting. Bro? Dude, I'm waiting for you. If you reply, I'll post it. Obviously, we did not give him more money. And for two days, nothing happened. No tweets, no action. And we didn't get any money.

we assumed we'd been scammed. Then, weirdly, on Wednesday, Crypto Alexander posted about Boingwum. That post got a lot of enthusiastic replies from accounts that look like bots, but when we checked our account on PumpFun, no one was buying. I'm not saying every person we DMed with was a scammer, but they all kind of sounded like this guy.

By Wednesday, we were basically out of promotion money. We only had a few bucks left. So it was time to take a look at how our coin had done. Wayne Wom's market cap has returned to almost its original value, but no one has traded it in a week. It's time to face reality. Our coin was a bust.

Azeem, I sent you some links just now. I just started opening them. I'm going into the Pump Fund page and logging in with my phantom. We wanted to talk to Azeem, our crypto expert, one more time to get his take on the whole thing.

We showed him our landing page and promotional copy, our social media, and told him about our attempts to find some KOLs. Honestly, I was looking at the market cap on Pump Fund and you have 20-something soul in here. I was surprised. How'd you do this? You mean we failed but not as badly as you were expecting? To be honest with you, yeah, this is better than I was expecting. Yeah.

Better than he was expecting, but still pretty abysmal. We lost money. We had to deal with all those shady accounts hitting us up. We were playing a game that we didn't know the rules to and one that is probably rigged. It's just unregulated gambling, right? Like this is the equivalent of like going to an illegal gambling den and hanging out.

hanging out with the people that are at illegal gambling dens. It's just, it's unregulated gambling. That's all it is. It's at some point in the future, I do believe that a lot of this stuff will have some sort of regulation around it for the exact reasons that you're seeing is that it's not just fun. It's, it's organized in a way that does exactly that is like exactly what you felt in the short period of time that you tried to do it is exactly that.

Then there is one other factor that Azeem says worked against us. Despite the popularity of platforms like PumpFun, the meme coin craze may actually be over. Since the launch of Donald Trump's meme coin with Trump, I have seen things really take a nosedive. And now, for the most part, to get any sort of noticeable upward price action is nearly impossible for meme coins.

Trump's meme coin kind of came in like a bully to the entire meme coin world. As of recording time, Reuters reported that the Trump meme coin made nearly $100 million in trading fees for the entities behind the coin. And according to analysis by three crypto firms, at least 50 of the largest investors in the coin made profits in excess of $10 million each.

At the same time, some 200,000 crypto wallets, most with small holdings, lost money. Azeem says TrumpCoin is a perfect example of how the meme coin industry works. People on the inside and people who move quickly profit. For everyone else, good luck. Azeem told us a story of a friend who decided to invest in TrumpCoin a day after the coin launched. He tried to talk his friend out of it.

And he put $5,000 in anyway. And not long after, he sold for a $3,000 loss with $2,000 left. And I was like, because you are what crypto people call the exit liquidity, right? Like, we need your money in so that we can then cash out. Because you realize that the scam is over. So, sure, anybody can make a coin. And anybody can invest. But if you're not an insider, a celebrity, or someone with a lot you can afford to lose...

You might want to think twice. That funny meme is just the front door to a casino. You might be the one in a million, but sooner or later, the house always wins. So what should we make of the people who are decamillionaires in this space? Some of them were very lucky. Other ones have insider information. There's a lot of Jordan Belfort, Wolf of Wall Street stuff going on in this space.

A lot of the wealthiest people I have found in this space, though, to be very fair, a lot of the wealthiest people I've just met in life are just usually devoid of things like morals and ethics. And it's the same. There's a lot of people in this space who are very wealthy and they do it 100% full well knowing that it's through extraction.

We spoke with Azeem a few times throughout this process, and we kept trying to figure out if there was any possible way for people like us to be successful. The final time we talked to Azeem, he was at home. Do you have any words of advice for people who want to do this? Like, what would you tell someone who came to you and said, I really want to get into meme coins?

I tell everyone almost exclusively to stay away from crypto if they don't know what they're doing. I remember in 2017 when friends wanted to get into ICOs. I remember in 2021 when friends wanted to get into NFTs. This year when friends wanted to get into meme coins, I always tell them,

Please stay away because your money is the money that scammers are going to use to run away with. Like the idea that you're thinking about this means you're going to get scammed because I know how insidious it in so many ways is. And to everyone else on the outside, it seems like this like naive thing where like you just put money in and you win the lottery. And so honestly, I tell everyone, like, stay away.

And that is it for our show today. Special thanks to Azeem Khan, Nitish Pawar, Maura Curry, Ben Richmond, and Shaina Roth. This episode is part of a larger project we're doing at Slate about the world of crypto and how Trump's embrace of it is threatening our financial systems overall. If you want to read that, go to slate.com slash crypto.

We are also going to be talking with Slate Plus members in a special Zoom on Wednesday, April 2nd at 5 p.m. If you're a Slate Plus member or you want to become one for this, go to slate.com slash plus. We'll be sending out an email with the Zoom link and we'll be giving away some Buenwa merch during it. What Next TBD is produced by Evan Campbell and Patrick Ford. Our show is edited by Susan Matthews and Slate is run by Hilary Frye.

TBD is part of the larger What Next family. And if you like what you heard, the best way to support us is to join Slate Plus. You get all these podcasts ad-free and no paywall on the Slate site.

TBD is part of the larger What Next family. And if you're looking for even more Slate podcasts to listen to, check out Thursday's episode from What Next. Our friends there talk with former Republican Congressman Adam Kinzinger about how bad the signal message leaks really are. All right, we'll be back on Sunday with another episode. I'm Lizzie O'Leary. Thanks for listening. I'm Leon Nafok, and I'm the host of Slow Burn Watergate. Before I started working on this show, I was a big fan of the show.

Everything I knew about Watergate came from the movie All the President's Men. Do you remember how it ends? Woodward and Bernstein are sitting with their typewriters, clacking away. And then there's this rapid montage of newspaper stories about campaign aides and White House officials getting convicted of crimes, about audio tapes coming out that prove Nixon's involvement in the cover-up. The last story we see is Nixon resigns. It takes a little over a minute in the movie. In real life, it took about two years.

Five men were arrested early Saturday while trying to install eavesdropping equipment. It's known as the Watergate incident. What was it like to experience those two years in real time? What were people thinking and feeling as the break-in at Democratic Party headquarters went from a weird little caper to a constitutional crisis that brought down the president? The downfall of Richard Nixon was stranger, wilder, and more exciting than you can imagine. Over the course of eight episodes, this show is going to capture what it was like to live through the greatest political scandal of the 20th century.

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