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Permissionless Preview: Joe McCann on Memecoins

The world’s best-performing hedge fund is all-in on memecoins.

According to Preqin data, Joe McCann’s Asymmetric fund posted a 202% gain in the 12 months to March 31 — the best performance posted by any hedge fund (in any category), over that time period.

That’s a significant achievement for Asymmetric, of course, but it’s perhaps even more significant for memecoins as a tradeable asset class. Hedge fund managers around the world must be asking themselves why they’ve spent the last year frantically churning a 15% return in oil futures or FX swaps when they could have bought and held WIF for an easy 100-bagger instead.

WIF is not the first memecoin to 100x, of course, but it’s presumably the first to help propel a hedge fund to the top of Preqin’s performance data — and that is not going unnoticed.

Bloomberg reported last week that “Hedge Funds Are Succumbing to Mind-Boggling Returns of Memecoins,” noting that even the blue-chip fund Brevan Howard has now bought in (albeit in “tiny” size).

Asymmetric was there first, though, so, to understand why memecoins are suddenly joining the investing mainstream, that’s who we should be listening to.

We’ll have an opportunity to listen to Joe McCann speaking on the topic at Permissionless III, but that’s not until October — by which time his memecoin thesis may have already played out. The global economy could well be in a depression by then…or dog coins could well be worth $1 trillion. 

(Or maybe both, if things get really weird.)

Fortunately, Joe agreed to stop slinging dog coins long enough to answer a few of my questions on the sector that helped propel his fund to the top of the Preqin performance charts. 

Anyone hoping to make money in memecoins should read the full transcript of our talk below — it’s full of invaluable insight and context for current or would-be memecoin traders.

But I’ve also picked out some highlights for those of you who are only dog coin-curious at this point, or just wondering what it’s all about:

Despite the recent pullback, Joe thinks that memecoins are here to stay: If crypto’s total market cap goes to $10 trillion (as every true believer believes it will), he expects memecoins could make up 10% of the market, achieving the upside scenario of his “depression or dogcoins to a trillion” thesis. 

That would likely include “some outsized winners that eventually eclipse the all-time high market cap of Dogecoin,” which hit $80 billion in 2021.

Joe puts a bullish spin on the recent surge in memecoin supply — “I actually see that as a net positive” — because all of the “activity and interest” that it’s generating may “solidify memecoins as an asset class.”

His big-picture view is that, instead of viewing memecoins as a “zero-sum game” of unlimited tokens competing for a limited pool of crypto money, we should “look at the amount of attention that exists on the internet and how that can be monetized.”

WIF, he says, has been unusually good at monetizing that attention because its meme is unusually sustainable: “Take the hat that's on the dog and put it on literally anything else. You now have created an infinite amount of memetic content that can spread throughout the Internet.” 

But he warns against overthinking it: “If you're looking for fundamentals in memecoins, you should just go back to business school because you're never going to find something that makes sense.” 

The fundamental question for memecoins is simply, “Does internet culture give a shit? If so, there's a good chance the value of that memecoin goes up. If not, it's probably not a valuable memecoin.”

Even in the latter case, however, he does not recommend shorting: “Shorting anything in crypto is typically a recipe for financial suicide.” 

Joe does recommend using technical analysis: “If you're trying to get serious about trading memecoins, you should probably get pretty good at technical analysis.”

Finally, he thinks you should know that this isn’t just about dog coins: “Philosophically, every cryptocurrency is some form of a memecoin because if it doesn't get propagated throughout internet culture, it doesn't exist.” 

I think he’s right: If you want to understand crypto, you have to understand memecoins.

So here’s the full transcript of my talk with Joe to help you figure it all out:

What were the market caps of BONK and WIF when you first bought them?

When I bought BONK for my fund it was about $28 million market cap. With WIF I think I bought it when the price was like $0.08 or something. 

What was your confidence level at the time?

Memecoins are the first kind of financial instrument available to [invest in] internet culture and the viral nature of the internet. So, when I started to see activity picking up on Solana in early Q4 of last year, you saw a lot of stablecoin inflows from Ethereum, particularly, you saw people starting to trade a lot more on Jupiter and Drift (the DEXs), and I thought to myself, well, a lot of these dollars will end up chasing memecoins. 

At the time, the only memecoin that really had any staying power was Bonk. I’ve talked and written about the history of Bonk and how it has this almost Netflix-quality story behind it. And it's a dog. If you look at the categories of memecoins — which is crazy to think that we are looking at investments now as categories of animals — dogs always outperform: Dogecoin, Shiba Inu and Bonk. 

I said, okay, if my hypothesis is correct that activity is about to pick up, then degen traders are going to chase what's happening on Solana and think, “Oh, my god, this is so much better than trading on Ethereum.” Well, they're going to buy memecoins. And if the memecoin is trading at a $28 million market cap and dogecoin at its peak was $85 billion and shiba inu at its peak was $48 billion, I mean, the asymmetry in that trade is just ridiculous, right? 

At the fund, we have very strict risk controls in place on our portfolio, which is, I think, unheard of at most crypto funds. We have a concentration-risk policy which says for any coin that isn't in the top 20 by market cap, we can only purchase 2% of the fund’s AUM. We did that with BONK and the hypothesis proved to be correct. 

It was synthesizing a lot of data points. It was also some of my own kind of finger on the pulse on what I thought could happen probabilistically and weighing the probabilities of certain outcomes, looking at what would be the highest-reward, lowest-risk trade. At the time that was BONK.

You mention Doge as a kind of a blue sky metric. Will any memecoin ever get as big as Doge did at the peak of the last cycle?

I do believe this to be true. The way I look at the evolution of memecoins is almost like software operating system updates. You start with iOS 1.0 and then you're at 2.0 and 3.0 and whatever it is today. I think about that as well with crypto, which is programmable money, and since it's programmable, it has versions. I think at a high level, memecoins as a category are now on like the 3.0 version and it's being ushered in by a chain that is super fast and cheap, which provides a very clean user experience for end users — that's Solana. 

And I do think that whether something eclipses Dogecoin or Dogecoin itself goes to new all-time highs is to be seen but Coinbase is launching Dogecoin futures contracts. There's chatter of ETFs, not in the US but in other countries for some other dog-related coins. I think if you look at the total crypto market cap increasing from its peak at roughly $3 trillion, if we go up 3x, you're going to see memecoins as a category rise with that. 

I have this kind of philosophical investing view, which has been labeled “depression or dogcoins to a trillion”: We can either be in a financial depression or dog coins go to a trillion dollars in market cap.

If the total crypto market cap goes to 10 trillion and memecoins make up 10% of that, I think you're going to have some outsized winners that eventually eclipse the all-time high market cap of Dogecoin.

It feels like we've hit a tipping point of memecoin saturation where there are just so many now. Do you think that changes the dynamic of the memecoin market?

Yeah, I do, and that's not going to stop. Instead of looking at a zero-sum game of dollars allocated to memecoins, I think you look at the amount of attention that exists on the internet and how that can be monetized as more and more people use the internet, as more and more people are engaging in social networks, particularly on their phones. Memecoins are just the financial instrument associated with that.

The ability to create a memecoin now is to click two buttons. So how do you make a memecoin achieve a billion-dollar market cap? Well, you have to have an actual strategy behind capturing attention and the viral nature of that. A lot of this comes down to, you know, the left curve — the meme itself. The left curve is what you have to embrace when it comes to memecoins because I think there's about 20,000 tokens created every day on Solana — most of those are zeros. Most of those are probably rugs and probably scams. But people are going to speculate. They've been speculating for hundreds of years, they're not going to stop. And now you have the ability to do it in real-time. 

Seasonally, every year and every few years, what are things that happen in pop culture that will have a memecoin associated with it? There's a presidential election, there's the NBA Finals, there's the Super Bowl, there's the World Cup, there's Easter, there's Christmas. All of these things will have memecoins created because it's going to be the topical thing at the moment, and people are going to embrace and kind of engage with memecoins, even if it's just for entertainment purposes. 

I mean, people will go to a gas station and buy a scratch-off ticket. They know that, statistically, they're not going to win, but they do it for entertainment. I think that the supply is less of a concern for me. I actually see that as a net positive because you're seeing a lot of activity and interest in the space to kind of solidify memecoins as an asset class.

Is there a difference in your mind between a memecoin like Doge that's a native token for its own blockchain and all the new coins that are just smart contracts?

There's broader categories in general. I just saw that Shiba Inu raised $12 million to build an L3 or something — that I did not see coming. So what I think will end up happening is you'll have kind of a winner-takes-most scenario where a handful of what I would call blue-chip memecoins are the ones that have staying power — your Dogecoins, your Shiba Inus, your Bonks. Then the longer tail of tokens, they're just capturing attention for the most part.

I wrote about this in our latest market update as well. There are going to be new metas associated with memecoins, where companies are trying to figure out how to either launch a memecoin or associate with a memecoin. For example, there's a coin that has a rather sophomoric name, in true memecoin fashion, Ligma Nodes — these are guys that are hardcore botters on Solana, hardcore engineers that are launching an infrastructure company for fast-landing transactions, but also monitoring software for new tokens that are coming to market. They launched a memecoin and they own zero of them. They put 100% of it into the liquidity pool. 

Yes, full disclosure, I'm a holder of this coin, but what's interesting about it to me is that you have a company that's utilizing the concept of a memecoin as almost a marketing tool for the core business, and it creates this virtuous feedback loop, right? If I'm a holder of this token, I want to tell other people about the token because I want them to hold it as well, because then in theory the price goes up, which is beneficial to Ligma, the company, because they're now offering services. So they're almost getting free distribution of the product that they have by an army of token holders. 

The way that memecoins are going to continue to evolve is not necessarily like, we've got these old-school ones like Dogecoin, Shiba Inu and Bonk that have very specific use cases and stories behind them. There's going to be a consistent, almost prototyping of what people can be doing utilizing memecoins. 

Finally, I had a couple of founders that I'm an advisor to reach out to me last month and they were talking about launching a memecoin for their product. I was like, well, what's the purpose of that? If the purpose is marketing, probably useful. But the second you put a token out in the market, you now have a community that you have to manage and maintain. Nothing is free with this type of stuff unless you really just don't care longer term which is the case with most of these memecoins — they're people that are just creating random stuff and it doesn't really matter what happens.

In the case of Ligma, there's no utility. It doesn't accrue any revenue from the people that use the nodes or something. So when they launched it, it’s just a memecoin. Then they announced that you could stake your Ligma tokens to get cheaper pricing on their RPC infrastructure. I don't know if they have a revenue-sharing thing, there's been chatter of that. But what’s fascinating to me about this is, a memecoin being launched is the farthest thing away from the Howey test. It cannot be a security. How the token gets utilized going forward, it's out on the public Internet, on-chain. People can really do whatever they want with it. And so when Ligma first launched, they just launched a memecoin, but now it's kind of, “oh, wait a second,” there's actually some value to holding this token and staking it or whatever as a holder that ultimately will benefit the company Ligma Nodes.

So is it still a memecoin?

Ask the market. I think if something launches as a memecoin and eventually becomes what would be viewed as a utility token, that's probably the natural evolution of the project. Bonk, for example, they just airdropped Bonk to wallet holders on Christmas Day, 2022. Now they have a suite of products that generates real protocol revenue that goes back into BONK.

Is Bonk still a memecoin then?

Sure, they launched as a memecoin, but if the litmus test is whether a memecoin achieves, say, a billion-dollar market cap, then, in theory, if the team or the person behind that memecoin had a broader vision for what they wanted to achieve, you're going to see a natural evolution of a memecoin becoming more utilitarian in its use. 

What about WIF?

We'll see what happens. With WIF, it’s a matter of constantly keeping the attention focused through folks like Ansem — who is kind of the main character right now in crypto and a big WIF guy — and the marketing stuff that the team behind WIF is doing. Or do they eventually launch a product or a service or something to that effect? We don't know. But I do know that if a memecoin becomes a blue chip you almost have to find ways of reinventing yourself to maintain your holder base, as well as the attention for new potential holders of the token. Just being a dog with a hat is cute and has been very successful but will that be the case in two years? If they don't do anything with the platform they built? 

Probably not, but maybe.

So why does WIF, which has no revenue, get a higher market cap than Bonk, which does have revenue?

Yeah, I love this question because there is no straight answer, I can only speculate. 

First, there are some major whales behind WIF that have been invested for a long time, so you’ve basically got someone who's going to bid it when it gets to certain levels. That's one aspect. I think the other aspect, which is more relevant, is, when I was on a podcast with Ansem, I think at the end of December, he said something that I completely agree with regarding his strategy around memecoins, which is he'll go talk to one of his friends who don't do anything in crypto, don't even know what a memecoin is, and ask, “If you were to buy a memecoin, which one would you buy?” Would they buy the dog with a hat? A cat? Something else? And nine times out of ten, they point to the dog with a hat — that is the epitome of left curve.

The team behind the WEN token (which I'm a holder of as well), they actually bought a Twitter account, which is, like, pictures of cats or something, 1.5 million followers. I mean, people love this stuff, right? They love looking at cats. They love looking at cute dogs. Well, if you got this cute dog with a hat on it, who doesn't love that, right? 

I'm not going to over-intellectualize memecoins, but there are some patterns that emerge as to why a memecoin could be successful or not. One is the tagline. For WIF, the tagline, “the hat stays on'' is pretty powerful from a creative-communication standpoint. That kind of visceral tagline sticks with people and is very powerful. 

Nike is the canonical example of this with “just do it.” They've had that phrase forever. And “the hat stays on” is something that can be interpreted and also, more importantly, applied in so many different ways. Take the hat that's on the dog and put it on literally anything else. You now have created an infinite amount of memetic content that can spread throughout the Internet. 

Forget the fact that there's these big whales involved. Left curve it — what does Ansem's girlfriend think is cute? — and then how can it create viral content and improve the memetic output of the meme itself? “Hat stays on” as a tagline, as well as literally taking the hat and putting it on different images throughout the Internet. 

To me, that's a recipe for success.

Do memecoins have fundamentals?

No. If you're looking for fundamentals in memecoins, you should just go back to business school because you're never going to find something that makes sense. 

Somebody asked me, what is internet culture? I referenced the Supreme Court justice in the case about pornography who said, “I don't know how to describe it, but I know it when I see it.” It's the same thing with internet culture. You can just kind of get a sense of some viral meme taking off or some picture or something, and people just rally behind it, and it spreads like wildfire. There's no fundamentals behind that, right? There's no, like, “this memecoin does XYZ and has these metrics and blah, blah.” 

No. What matters is, does the internet care? That's all that matters. That's the fundamental value of a memecoin, does internet culture give a shit? If so, there's a good chance the value of that memecoin goes up. If not, it's probably not a valuable memecoin.

What's a better risk/reward? Betting on a $10 million coin to 10x or a billion-dollar coin to 2x?

Ha. This is not financial advice, but clearly the $10 million market cap one. 

There's some kind of psychological rejiggering that takes place with a lot of memecoins because [the price of a token is typically] a fraction of a fraction of a US penny, right? People feel like, “Oh man, I own a million of these, if this thing goes to a dollar, I'm a millionaire.”

The probability of that is infinitesimally small, but it doesn't matter, that's how people think. They speculate, they gamble, and they envision this outcome and they feel like they’re a millionaire. 

That's one aspect, it's called unit bias. The potential for it to go up is much higher than if something’s already a billion dollar market cap going to 2 billion. 

The other thing is — and I'm kind of going against what I previously said — some of the fundamentals here are how many holders of it exist. What a lot of memecoin traders do is they track the number of wallets that are holding a particular token. As that goes up, the market cap subsequently goes up with it. Again, I would argue that if the number of holders of the token is low, it’s a $10 million market cap, and it has a low unit bias, it makes more sense to buy the $10 million market cap coin, from a risk/reward perspective. It doesn't even matter what it is. It's just that the numbers themselves suggest that this thing going from ten to 100 million is probably stronger than a blue chip memecoin going from a billion to 2 billion.

Are those too small for your fund?

I don't want to say we don't trade $10 million mark cap coins. We are not above it. Yes, there are liquidity constraints. I run a nine-figure AUM fund and you can't really be buying $5 million worth of a $10 million market cap coin. That being said, I do think there’s a new meta around memecoins being launched for companies and this is almost like a decentralized, democratized way of doing angel investing. 

If you put a $50,000 check into an angel investment and it does 50x, like, amazing, right? If it goes to zero, it's not the end of the world if you're running a fund. We have technology in-house that enables us to do this type of stuff in a way that doesn't disrupt the market too much, so we can accumulate tokens in a meaningful way without breaking the bank or exploding the market cap (which is actually more important).

The bigger issue becomes, if a memecoin that you buy at, say, a $10 million market cap goes to a billion-dollar market cap, how do you sell it? Wow, you crushed it — you're up whatever, 100x, 1000x, whatever it is. But now you've got $100 million worth of this memecoin. 

We also have solutions for this in place with a lot of the broker-dealers that we work with, as well as how our in-house technology enables us to potentially exit positions in a reasonable way. If you hit it big, the bigger issue is, well, how do you exit, and when do you exit?

All of these things we've sorted out within the fund at Asymmetric, which I think is one of the reasons why we’ve become the top-performing hedge fund on earth at this point.

Do you ever short memecoins?

Never. Shorting anything in crypto is typically a recipe for financial suicide. 

There will be a moment where memecoins reach a fever pitch, likely when there's a cyclical top in the broader crypto market, if not risk assets in general. We do track macro pretty closely at Asymmetric — we were super bearish and actually short in 2022. We flipped the switch at the end of 2022 and got long and we maintain a long bias now. Maybe 2025 is the cycle top, and if we get bearish again, we will look for opportunities to short, but we do it in a more sophisticated way than just shorting the token because that is how you get your face ripped off.

There are ways of using derivatives to get downside directional exposure with a fixed amount of risk. The question then becomes, well, how do you buy and sell options for memecoins? It's coming.

OTC, I assume? 

That's correct.

Do you only do Solana memecoins?

Currently, yes. 

I mean, personally, not through the fund, I've done some stuff on, say, Ethereum, but I’ve been beating the drum for five years now that end users don't give a shit about decentralization. What they care about are really good experiences, fast and cheap, period. End of story. Today, that is on Solana.

What about Base? 

I’m structurally bearish on L2s. Long term, I think Base has the best shot at getting a lot of retail to trade, say, memecoins because of Coinbase. There's a funnel of, call it, 35, 40 million accounts that could potentially be trading on Base. But we don't currently trade on Base. Part of this is we have developed a level of expertise in and around Solana, and that has enabled us to have the performance that we've had as a fund. There's no reason for us to go into what we call “style drift” in the fund world. We don't want to drift away from our style because it's working.

That does not mean we are not keeping a pulse on what's happening on Base. In fact, we wrote about Base well over a year ago when it was first being discussed and we've been tracking it since. I do think Base has a very solid chance of competing with something like Solana, largely because of its connection to Coinbase and this massive pool of end users. But for us, it's Solana till it's not. I just don't see a path in the short- to intermediate-term of somebody disintermediating what Solana is capable of doing. 

Do they have congestion issues? Yes. You have that because of activity, right? Like, those are great bugs to solve. People were reaching out to me when the congestion issues were happening, and I'm like, I know that this is painful but this is actually good for the chain because when we get this 10x increase in users will be ready for it. 

And you have folks like Jump and their Fire Dancer client coming out, which dramatically increases performance in terms of transactions per second, as well as decentralizing the types of validator clients that run on the network. So you kind of skirt potential reliability issues, etc. So, long story short, I struggle to see a scenario where Solana loses out on retail as it relates to trading memecoins anytime soon.

If Solana were to double from here, what do you think Bonk and WIF would do?

This kind of gets into portfolio construction. If your benchmark is Solana, then you need some beta to that. What's the highest beta that you can get on Solana? It's probably a memecoin. In fact, there's an argument to be made that the highest beta in crypto, period, is memecoins. I would think that if Solana goes from, say, 150-ish right now to 300, I think there's a non-zero chance that WIF's trading at $10 and Bonk is significantly higher, probably, I don't know, in the range of 4 to 5x from where it is right now.

Do Solana-based memecoins go up when SOL goes up? Or is it the other way around?

We tracked this at Asymmetric. What people end up doing when they buy SOL is they fund a wallet and then go buy some memecoins. Then the SOL that they have goes up in value and what do they do? They maybe park it in a lending protocol and borrow against it and buy more memecoins. And then their memecoins go up in value, and then what do they do? They park that in a lending protocol and buy more memecoins. And the cycle continues. So, what you're getting is a compounded amount of what we call embedded leverage in the system. And this will happen again.

The shock to the system that happened, particularly on Solana when it went from almost $200 to $116 on Binance within a few days, is massive deleveraging of this embedded leverage. So, as a trader, you can follow the funding rates on centralized exchanges to get a sense of how bullish or bearish the market is. Are we overextended on the upside? Are we too bearish on the downside? But for memecoins, this [leverage] is primarily on-chain, if not all of it. The long tail of tokens are all being created on-chain and when you start to see that kind of compounded, embedded leverage in a system backing the rise of memecoins, you are going to have huge deleveraging events. I think you will see many of these with memecoins going forward. 

This is the player-versus-player approach to trading memecoins: Did you get liquidated? Did you get rinsed in the liquidation cascade or not? Did you get out? Did you make money? Did you buy the dip? It's all part of the culture around trading memecoins. And so the result, I think, for these memecoins, is they're going to trade highly beta to Solana. As Solana increases in value, you're naturally going to see people take out more leverage against that, and the cycle will continue.

Does technical analysis work in memecoins? If so, does it work better than in other things, like equities?

I love this question because I have been doing technical analysis for 24 years and I love it when people tell me that TA doesn't work because I just show them my P&L.

It's almost metaphysical as it relates to memecoins and crypto. Technical analysis tends to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, where people see lines on a chart, they see certain indicators — oversold, overbought, moving averages, you name it. If enough people see it and enough people believe in it, guess what happens? The prophecy fulfills, right? Assuming somebody isn't betting the other side with more ammo.

Memecoins are the second derivative of this, if you will, because, number one, memecoins are about attention. Number two, if you apply TA to something that's about attention, and then that gets attention, well, guess what happens to the attention? It goes up or it goes down, depending on the form of TA that you're using. So, I would argue that part of the reason I think Ansem has been so successful in trading memecoins is because he uses technical analysis. So, yes, I think if you're trying to get serious about trading memecoins, you should probably get pretty good at technical analysis.

Last question: Is bitcoin a memecoin?

Yes. That was easy. 

Bitcoin operates kind of like a religion and for any religion to survive, you need evangelical crazies to just go nuts about it, right? They have to spread the gospel of the meme that is Bitcoin. So I think there is a clear argument to be made that the first digital cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, is, in fact, the result of a meme.

Now, we can look into the Austrian economics of Bitcoin as fixed supply, sound money, all of these narratives. But these narratives are memes, right? So the way people get indoctrinated into the religion of Bitcoin is through narratives, which are memes. 

I think that is a deeply underappreciated aspect of cryptocurrency in general — that narratives drive flows, which drive price, for any cryptocurrency. Ethereum is very good at this. They got the Shappella upgrade and the Dencun upgrade, and it's always some upgrade of the protocol, or now it's the ETF. That is just another form of a meme that's propagating throughout internet culture.

So, yeah, I would argue that, philosophically, every cryptocurrency is some form of a memecoin, because if it doesn't get propagated throughout internet culture, it doesn't exist. 

And the way that you become a part of internet culture is by spreading memes.

― Byron Gilliam

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