When the newbies start writing the script: The global financial truths exposed by Meme coin rollercoasters

National Day Holiday, A-shares are closed, and investors are taking photos and checking in at scenic spots. Meanwhile, something even crazier is happening in the crypto world.

A few meme tokens with names that sound like jokes have seen their market caps multiply dozens of times in just a few days. Meme4, PALU, and some even more outrageous names have allowed early investors to easily see gains of over a million US dollars on paper. The Chinese-language community is buzzing, with top influencers on Twitter shouting buy signals wildly, as if they’ve discovered the secret to wealth.

However, the good times didn’t last long. Starting October 9, these coins began to plummet vertically. Some dropped 95% in a single day, over 100,000 traders were forced to liquidate, and a total of $621 million evaporated.

The dream of overnight wealth, only to wake up and find yourself just a background character in someone else’s story.

I’ve seen scenes like this both on Wall Street and in Lujiazui.

Remember GameStop? The American template of retail frenzy

If you think meme coins are absurd, think back to GameStop in 2021.

Reddit retail investors banded together, pushing the stock price of a struggling game retailer to the moon, causing short-selling institutions to suffer huge losses and doubt their entire strategy. The US SEC chairman at the time called it a “milestone in behavioral finance”—though the prices were absurd, as long as the trades were real and information was transparent, it was considered market behavior.

The American playbook is: bubbles? Let them happen. Because bubbles can spawn new financial products.

If this meme coin spectacle had happened on NASDAQ, how would Wall Street have reacted? They might have designed a “Meme Stock ETF” to quantify social media hype into investment factors; The Wall Street Journal would publish long articles discussing “the victory of retail capitalism”; the SEC might initiate research on “social media market manipulation,” ultimately concluding that: this isn’t fraud, but a collective financial response driven by group sentiment through algorithms and social networks.

But in China, the script is entirely different.

If similar events occurred in the A-shares market, regulators would quickly issue risk warnings, media would call for rational investing, and the entire incident would be classified as a “speculative market anomaly,” becoming a vivid case for investor education.

The Chinese market’s logic is “steady progress”—it can be lively, but within rules; innovation is welcome, but risks must be borne by oneself.

But meme coins live in the third world

The magic of the crypto market is that it is neither regulated by the SEC nor constrained by the China Securities Regulatory Commission.

This is a lawless land. A gray financial experiment zone organized spontaneously by code, liquidity, and narrative.

Here, the American-style social speculation mechanism ( information viral spread + collective momentum ) and the Chinese grassroots wealth mentality ( community sense of belonging + dreams of sudden wealth ) have strangely fused.

Trading platforms are no longer neutral parties but have become “narrative generators”; KOLs are no longer bystanders but act as amplifiers of prices; retail traders revel and self-destruct in cycles of algorithms and consensus.

The most fundamental change is: prices are no longer determined by cash flow, but by the speed of narrative dissemination and the density of consensus. We are witnessing the birth of “emotional capital”—a new form of capital without financial reports, only cultural symbols; without fundamentals, only consensus curves; not pursuing rational returns, but emotional explosions.

When algorithms fail, emotion becomes currency

Data is brutal: in the first nine months of 2025, 90% of top meme coins’ market caps collapsed; in the second quarter, 65% of new tokens lost more than 90% of their value within six months.

It’s like the gold rush of the digital age—most prospectors lost everything, only those selling shovels profited quietly.

But the core issue is: when money starts telling stories, the underlying logic of global finance is being rewritten.

In traditional markets, prices reflect value; in crypto markets, prices create value.

This is both the extreme expression of decentralization and an example of extreme irresponsibility. When narratives replace cash flow, and emotions become the standard for asset valuation, each of us is a lab rat in this experiment.

Where is the way out?

The Web3 industry stands at a crossroads. Should it continue to indulge in the short-term frenzy of “emotional capitalism,” or move toward the long-term construction of a “value-driven ecosystem”?

The true direction should be: strengthen community governance, introduce more transparent regulatory frameworks, and establish systemic investor education. Only then can decentralized technology truly promote global financial fairness, rather than becoming a tool for a few to harvest.

Next time you see a top influencer frantically promoting “hundredfold coins,” ask yourself:

Am I participating in a financial innovation, or am I paying for someone else’s wealth freedom?

When money starts telling stories, what you need most is not FOMO(Fear of Missing Out), but the ability to think calmly.