Memecoins Are Worth $55B: Are They Bad?

Stripe USDC Payment | Movement $38M Series A

Marco Manoppo & Karon Pangestu
April 26, 2024

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Good Morning.

The crypto markets is becoming more and more PVP-esque after two months of BTC price action ranging in the $60-70k range. Fidelity also just had its first spot Bitcoin ETF outflow. Stay cautious!

In Today's Email:

What Matters: $55B worth of memecoins 👊
Founders Highlight: Samourai’s co-founders ⚔️
Deal Flows: Movement’s $38M Series A 💰️

You read and share. We listen and improve. Send us feedback at marco@launchy.app.

Narratives: options are looking attractive the longer we go sideways.

We just launched a crypto appstore ranking bot that tracks top apps across the US. This includes exchanges like Coinbase and Kraken; and wallets such as phantom and Metamask. Check it out here.

We are now publishing airdrop alphas on our telegram!

WHAT MATTERS

Memecoins Are Worth $55B: Are They Bad?

Besides undermining the long-term vision of crypto that has kept so many of us in the space, memecoins aren't very technically interesting.
It shouldn't be a surprise that they're not attractive to builders.
— Eddy Lazzarin 🟠🔭 (@eddylazzarin)
3:01 PM • Apr 24, 2024

State of play: A16z Crypto’s CTO Eddy Lazzarin said on X that memecoins change perceptions of crypto, resembling either a risky casino or a facade of false promise - it also impacts adoption, regulation, and builder behavior.

Lazzarin also said, “Besides undermining the long-term vision of crypto that has kept so many of us in the space, memecoins aren't very technically interesting”.
Lazzarin's comments were in response to Michael Dempsey's post, indicating that memecoins have caused frustration among crypto builders.
In a debate with Lazzarin, 6th Man Ventures co-founder Mike Dudas disagrees that memecoins are harmful and useless and refers to ‘the numbers’ (memecoins collective market cap).

Why it Matters: According to CoinGecko, Meme coins market cap is currently at ~$55B, bigger than LSTs market cap (~$43B), DePIN tokens (~$26B), AI and ZK tokens ($21B each).

For builders and investors: This will continue to be the case so long as infra projects over-raise and fail to justify their valuations to retail and active traders.

some rant: the whole memecoins bad vs good debate is so tiring
it's never inherently bad. trading memecoins is no different than trading Trump's Truth Social or a new chain that trades at 200x P/E ratio
> launching a token is going public
if you don't want people to focus on… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
— Marco Manoppo (@ManoppoMarco)
8:20 AM • Apr 26, 2024

BUILDER-INVESTOR HIGHLIGHT

Keonne and William of Samourai

Samourai

Today’s founders’ highlight is a different as we want to bring awareness to the Samourai Wallet situation. Privacy is a right. We hope this case doesn’t evolve into the likes of Tornado Cash’s founders.

Intro: Keonne Rodriguez and William Lonergan Hill are the co-founders of Samourai Wallet, a Bitcoin wallet that promises to keep users’ transactions private and identity masked.

Rodriguez and Hill were arrested for allegedly executing $2B+ in unlawful transactions and laundering over $100B in criminal proceeds.
The Samourai Wallet website has been seized, and a warrant has been issued for its mobile app on the Google Play Store.
Rodriguez (35), the CEO of Samourai, is also the director of Katana Cryptographic and the CEO of Consigno Holdings.
Hill (65) is the CTO of Samourai.

Previous background: Keonne Rodriguez is an Oxford graduate. He started as a web designer/developer. He worked as a product lead at Blockchain.com from 2014 to 2016.

There is no information available regarding William Hill.

The big idea: Rodriguez and Hill built Samourai as a privacy-focused wallet that enables users to make collaborative and private transactions to enhance the privacy of their Bitcoin operations.

Take a peek at our referral reward at the bottom of this issue. Share this newsletter and receive our list of 500 crypto VC individuals 👇

INSIGHTS

Stripe Supports USDC Stablecoin Payments

Crypto is back. @stripe will start supporting global stablecoin payments this summer. Transactions instantly settle on-chain and automatically convert to fiat. Join the waitlist stripe.com/use-cases/cryp… and watch the demo (h/t @solana) from Sessions.
— John Collison (@collision)
6:12 PM • Apr 25, 2024

The world’s largest payment company is reintroducing its crypto payments support for later in 2024.

Stripe will facilitate payments using Circle’s USDC on Solana, Ethereum, and Polygon blockchains.
Stripe stopped supporting Bitcoin payments in 2018.
In December 2022, Stripe debuted a project to facilitate fiat-to-crypto payments.

DEAL FLOWS

Movement Labs’s $38M Series A

Movement Labs

Deal flows slowed down a bit this week, we saw $110M in deals 💼

Movement Labs, a blockchain firm aiming to integrate Facebook's Move Virtual Machine with Ethereum, raised $38M in a Series A funding round led by Polychain Capital.

Movement's funding round involved VC firms including Hack VC, Placeholder, Archetype, Maven 11, Robot Ventures, Bankless Ventures, OKX Ventures, dao5, and Aptos Labs.
Movement Labs’s founders aim to make blockchain security sexy with Movement L2, an L2 based on the Move programming paradigm.
The Movement team aims to achieve greater security and transaction speeds than L2 incumbents.
The company is also launching Move Stack, a blockchain execution environment compatible with popular frameworks like the OP Stack and Arbitrum Orbit.
Movement is also developing a shared sequencer for decentralized communication between L1 and L2 chains.

Deal flows in the past week:

Lambda Finance, $1.8M Angel Round
Shiba Inu, $12M Pre-Seed & Seed Round
Uncharted, $1.7M Seed Round
Othentic, $4M Seed Round
Prime Intellect, $5.5M Seed Round
Tevaera, $5M Seed & Private Round
Turnkey, $15M Series A Round
Aligned Layer, $20M Series A
Movement Labs, $38M Series A
Only1, $1.3M Strategic Round
Natix, $4.6M Strategic Round

QUICK BITES

Stripe to enable USDC payments.
Pantera Capital seeks $1B for new crypto fund V.
DCG appoints Aimie Killeen as Chief Legal Officer.
Pantera acquires additional discounted SOL tokens.
FBI warns against using unregistered crypto services.
Worldcoin wants to partner with PayPal and OpenAI.
US spot Bitcoin ETFs see a daily net outflow of $120M.
Immutable plans a $50M crypto gaming rewards program.
Consensys sues SEC, challenging its approach to Ethereum.
Fidelity’s spot bitcoin ETF records outflow for the first time.
Morgan Stanley may allow brokers to recommend Bitcoin ETFs.
SEC delays decision on listing and trading spot bitcoin ETF options.
Franklin Templeton enables p2p transfer for its onchain USG fund.
Celsius Loan creditors plan appeal of Celsius' reorganization plan.

NOTEWORTHY READS

Udi’s read on BIP-420.
Officer CIA’s read on the only safe way to store crypto.
Regan Bozman’s read on apps that vertically integrate.

Behold the state of our industry.
Remember the good ol' days when people said gm simply because it felt good?
gm
— Durden ∞⧖ (@durdenwannabe)
11:38 AM • Apr 24, 2024

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