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“I don’t think it’s here to stay,” Dave Portnoy said with a reference to the coin meme – the same corner of the crypto, which he often poured fuel through his antiquity of social media.
When he spoke on stage at Consensus 2025 with Tom Farley, CEO Crypto Exchange Bullish, founder BarStol Sports peeled layers of his short, chaotic stint in the Meme Coin world. Portnoy, with his usual insolent sincerity, described the way of sudden unexpected places, legal minutes and a type of public resistance, which could get the most solidified provocateur twice.
“I love a rush, I’m a player in my heart,” he admitted. “But then is my smart part of me like, is it worth hate?” The conversation was part of a wider discussion about crypt’s culture by speculation and hype, where Meme Coins-tokens created more for jokes than usefulness-they caught the imagination of young traders of risk. Portnoy, who put Barstool in the media empire on viral content and sports gambling, found himself in the same digital fever.
It started with Safemoon, one of the first viral tokens of crypto boom from Covid. Portnoy saw social media contributions about how merchants gain profits “9 000 000%”, purchased, created a video that ridiculed its lack of actual value – and yet sue.
“Basically they said that Safemoon paid me for their promotion. Total lie. It cost me $ 20,000 to get out of the trial.” said.
Continuous, pushed further. Portnoy, inspired by the idea of a bar coin market and skipping the public problems, began to explore how MEME coins are produced. This led him to a developer who built a token named Libra, allegedly supported by President of Argentina.
Portnoy bought $ 4.5 million in value.
“I was in a dream with Lady Gaga. I just wrote. I’m glad what the hell is going on here?” said. The developer told him that Elon Musk would tweete about it. Instead, the President was abolished. “I lost all my money.”
Portnoy says he was lucky – the developer later returned him to full, even if he wasn’t sure why. “I’m one of those happy, but you know, I’m not going to take the money back.”
Despite losses, Portnoy continued. Launched coins called greed and greed 2leaned into satire. Other coins, prison, emerged from public outrage for his experiments with MEME coins. Someone else created a token, but Portnoy accepted the name and published about it. At one point, they claim that an investment of $ 1,000 has run to $ 7 million – within an hour.
“It took me 13 years to make such money in BarStool,” he said.
But what goes up almost always crashes back down. Portnoy says that he has lost an overview of how many times he has been charged with a “carpet of moves”, which is a term when the initiates throw the coin and leave latencomers with worthless tokens.
He described the Meme Coins as a plane game in which the main group of first buyers with business robots and algorithms dominated when to leave. “It’s the same group of winners and it’s the same group of losers.”
This realization seems to have changed its appetite. While he teased the possible start of greed 3, he admitted that the will is a heavier stomach in real life. One man confronted him in a casino in Las Vegas and claimed he lost $ 200,000. “It’s all fun and computer games, but it strengthens people who lose and make real money, and they don’t always take responsibility for the risk, even though I think they should.”
Despite money and memories, he says that the MEME coin scene is ultimately unsustainable.
“I understand why people like it,” he said. “It’s a form of gambling, it’s a ponzi scheme, I don’t mean it negatively.”
Portnoy doesn’t claim to have answers. But if it’s the weather where Mania Meme Coin Mania could aim, the prognosis looks grim. “I can’t imagine being here to stay. I think she’s staying here for the next four years. What will happen then?
