The Dangers of Trending News Meme Coins

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If you live in the US, chances are on Tuesday morning you were struck with news articles (good, bad, ugly – depending on your algorithm) about Kamala Harris picking Minnesota Governor, Tim Walz, as her running mate.

As a result, two degen-related things happened in crypto:

1. The ~$123M crypto pool of bets placed on Polymarket for who Harris’ running mate would be was divvied out (which was at just 4% odds of Walz winning as of Friday last week).

2. Tim Walz meme coins flew up in value (before crashing right back down).

   For example, the one week old ‘tem walz’ Solana-based meme coin went all the way up to having a market cap of almost $1M, and then came all the way back down to a market cap of ~$250k as ‘investors’ sensed a bubble and pulled their money out.

So, what’s the moral of this story?

Firstly, crypto is crazy. Even if it doesn’t feel like real money because it’s in token form, that’s real money that’s being played with on meme coins.

Solana-based meme coins have been one of the big catalysts for the growth of the crypto industry as a whole in the past year or so, and chances are, more and more meme coins will continue to be launched about trending news.

But before you get sucked into the lure of those potential green candles, remember that putting money into ‘tem walz’ is not a long term investment strategy; so make sure you’re only ‘investing’ what you can afford to lose.

It just might end up going to zero.