"Silicon Valley Joins Memecoin Frenzy: JellyJelly Token Surges, Then Crashes"

Silicon Valley wants in on memecoin craze

Silicon Valley, the heart of the tech industry, is taking notice of the memecoin craze and wants a piece of the action. With the recent launch of several mainstream tech players endorsing memecoins, it seems that animal spirits are back in crypto, and tech players want a seat at the table, past qualms be damned.

One such example is the launch of a token for JellyJelly, a TikTok-meets-FaceTime app, on the Solana memecoin launchpad pump.fun. The token quickly raced to over $230 million in market capitalization before crashing to under $100 million in less than a day. The co-founder of Venmo, Iqram Magdon-Ismail, launched the token and expressed excitement about the launch on Twitter, with one of Solana’s co-founders also texting him about the project.

Sam Lessin, a general partner at Slow Ventures, which invested in both Venmo and Solana, promoted the memecoin on his X account. However, it’s unclear how much of the token he owns, if any. The saga came shortly after a co-founder of the defunct video sharing app Vine launched a memecoin of his own, which also saw its market cap spike before quickly retracting.

While some investors are bullish on memecoins, others remain skeptical. Dragonfly general partner Rob Hadick believes that launching memecoins will not gain any real traction over any reasonable length of time. He cited attention dilution, the negative feeling investors get from losing money, and significant regulatory risk as marks against startup coins.

People in crypto and tech tend to overreact to short-term market dynamics, and we saw very similar discourse about NFTs in 2021, which turned out to be almost entirely wrong. Start your day with top crypto insights from David Canellis and Katherine Ross. Subscribe to the Empire newsletter. Explore the growing intersection between crypto, macroeconomics, policy, and finance with Ben Strack, Casey Wagner, and Felix Jauvin. Subscribe to the Forward Guidance newsletter. Get alpha directly in your inbox with the 0xResearch newsletter—market highlights, charts, degen trade ideas, governance updates, and more. The Lightspeed newsletter is all things Solana,