We Made a Memecoin | 2025 in Review
What Next
Slate Podcasts
4.6 • 2.3K Ratings
🗓️ 21 December 2025
⏱️ 35 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
All this week, What Next and What Next: TBD are re-airing some of our favorite conversations from throughout the year and checking back with the people in those conversations to see how things have – or haven’t – changed. This episode originally aired in March.
Memecoins are a niche type of cryptocurrency with no intrinsic value. But they remain a popular form of crypto, as seen earlier this year with President Trump’s own memecoin. And if it worked for him, then why not our little podcast?
Guests:
Azeem Khan, advisor to UNICEF’s crypto fund and cocreator of the blockchain Morph.
Nitish Pahwa, Slate staff writer covering business and tech.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Earlier this year, we here at TBD ran a little experiment. |
| 0:08.2 | Helping us to conduct this experiment was Azeemcon. |
| 0:11.3 | He works in crypto, specifically blockchains. |
| 0:14.8 | And when we first spoke to him back in March, meme coins were having a bit of a moment. |
| 0:20.4 | In 2024, you know, there was random things like fart coin running up to multi-billion |
| 0:24.5 | dollar valuations. But when we called him to catch up with them again, things had changed. |
| 0:30.7 | It wasn't going to be able to hold up. And that's exactly what happened. The idea of |
| 0:34.8 | meme coins fizzled out, you know, here and there may |
| 0:37.5 | be a pop, you know, one every week or one every two weeks or something. And it just, it wasn't |
| 0:43.0 | tenable that it would sustain. And it didn't. In fact, Azeem says that in general, crypto's whole |
| 0:48.8 | year has been untenable. |
| 0:53.6 | There was so much excitement in the crypto markets for Trump coming in and what that meant. |
| 0:59.7 | And what it really ended up being was Trump coin extracting a massive amount of money from |
| 1:04.7 | markets and then Melania coin doing that and President Miele's coin with Libra in Argentina. |
| 1:11.7 | And we saw some of these debacles, in my opinion. |
| 1:15.5 | And then from there, you know, everything that President Trump has done to make not just |
| 1:21.5 | crypto markets, but all markets, terrible and precarious and up and down and volatile. |
| 1:30.7 | Trump has put crypto-friendly figures in U.S. regulatory agencies. He's pardoned crypto executives. And his family has made more than a |
| 1:37.6 | billion dollars from its own crypto empire. And yet, in the past two months, Bitcoin's value |
| 1:43.7 | fell by a quarter. Investors blame everything |
| 1:46.8 | from ballooning tech valuations to instability from tariffs and interest rates. |
| 1:52.6 | It's funny because coming into the top of the year after the election at the end of last year, |
... |
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