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Memecoins are criticized for being useless, despite being heaps of fun and a path to riches. Here are the 5 real uses for useless memecoins.

Memes are crypto distilled to its essence: social trends, wry humor and the lure of ridiculous profits all wrapped up in a token that doesnt do anything. Its not for Warren Buffett, but it is for a huge range of ordinary people looking for fun, community and a lottery ticket out of the backwater they live in.

The meme is the alpha, says Danny Yang, founder of OnChainMonkey, referring to the insane returns against other metrics. Memecoins gamify the investment process as investors swoop in to follow intangible trends from election results or jump on the latest coin minted 10 minutes after the UnitedHealthcare CEO shooting suspect was arrested. Very 4Chan-esque. 

Building communities, social bonds and having fun are all part of the attraction of memecoins. Humans are social creatures, and memes are about people who find entertainment in the same thing, Yang says.

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13 crypto gift ideas from SOL and ETH phones, to NFT picture frames and Sui gaming handhelds. Hint: You could also just buy them for yourself.

Forget ugly sweaters and fruitcakes. This Christmas, its all about the Bitcoin bling and blockchain delights. 

Whether your loved one is mining crypto under the mistletoe, flexing their non-fungible tokens like Christmas ornaments, or staking tokens while sipping eggnog, Cointelegraphs 2024 holiday gift guide has the perfect presents to light up their holiday.

Here are 13 Web3 gifts to wrap up for crypto enthusiasts this holiday season.

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Shiba Inu whale Shibtoshi reveals how he gets around paying big capital gains tax bills, and that time he accidentally coded up a honeypot.

Shiba Inu whale Shibtoshi often works through the night, before crashing and sleeping during the day. Little is known of this enigmatic character, who wears a gold-themed mask when in public and is surrounded by a security detail.

When hes not trading or building, Shibtoshi enjoys hunting and shooting. He posts different videos on X of him shooting machine guns and firing weapons from tanks. That is just what he likes to do to decompress. 

He amassed a position in Shiba Inu worth north of $5 billion at times with just 37 ETH not bad for a man who does not call himself a trader and has never played with stocks and shares. For him, it is pure crypto, and he learned to approach the memecoin casino with a gamblers mindset and lots of trial and practice. 

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Charles Hoskinson drives Cardano’s many achievements but also overshadows them with controversial comments and by picking pointless fights.

Charles Hoskinson is arguably the best and worst thing about Cardano. Without him, of course, the chain would not exist hes driven its development over the past decade and claims he invested $450 million of his own funds into bootstrapping the network.

But hes also a magnet for bad publicity who makes everything about him and constantly picks pointless fights. This week, for example, hes threatening to sue Wyoming for not using Cardano for its stablecoin. He frequently overshadows the networks many technical achievements in terms of decentralization, governance and its new privacy-focused sidechain, Midnight.

Despite just having turned 37, he looks like a semi-retired professor with his retreating hairline, greying beard and signature colorful shirts during our interview at Token2049 he was wearing a kitten. Being born middle-aged may have helped spark his keen interest in researching experimental stem cell longevity therapies, which he plans to trial on himself to turn the clock back 10 years. 

With a fortune of around $1.2 billion (according to him), Hoskinson has enough money to do whatever he likes whether its hunting alien artifacts, gene editing glow-in-the-dark plants, or trying to convince world leaders like Argentinas Javier Milei and the Trump transition team of the benefits of crypto and/or running the world on Cardano.

Hoskinsons amount of wealth is often called fuck you money, and he appears to embody the idiom, frequently saying controversial things and insulting other projects and people in his characteristically blunt way.

When we were introduced, Magazine joked that we were hoping youll say something horribly controversial, and then we can get a great news story out of it.

And thats precisely what happened after Hoskinson explained at length why Ethereum is run like a dictatorship. After Cointelegraph published a news story to that effect, he very publicly complained about being accurately quoted. Not being misquoted, or quoted out of context he was just upset that a story was published based on something he said.

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Kain Warwick also admits the Infinex Patron NFT sale did not go as planned, with just 2% of users buying the most liquid NFT tier.

Kain Warwick, the Australian behind decentralized perps protocol Synthetix and now UX layer Infinex, says the clock is now ticking for crypto to grow fast enough to reach the point where no one could ever try to shut it down again.

Speaking to Magazine at Nears Redacted conference in Bangkok, Warwick says the crypto industry specifically his latest venture, Infinex has four years to break into the mainstream.

If we can get mass adoption in the next four years, which I think is achievable, and bring everyone onchain, and we have hundreds of millions or even billions of users, the jobs done you cant shut it down.

Infinex is Warwicks bid at solving the risks that come with centralized platforms seen in the multibillion-dollar implosions of FTX, BlockFi, Celsius and Voyager Digital without sacrificing the normie-friendly features many of these platforms once offered. 

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Gaming firms are split on whether blockchain should be the main character in Web3 games.

Off The Grid, a battle royale shooting game drizzled with a hint of blockchain, had an electric debut, with players spinning up 9.12 million wallets and more than 100 million transactions in its first month.

But Off The Grids use of blockchain technology is more of an optional extra than a core element. The graphics and gameplay do not run onchain and its NFT in-game items are opt-in. The game intends to launch a marketplace where items can be traded on Gunz, an Avalanche subnet. A to-be-launched GUN token will be the in-game currency that can be used to purchase items and skins.

Its success shows that emphasizing good gameplay, with blockchain elements as an added feature that enhances the experience for those who want it, can be a winning move. It helped Gunzilla Games, the studio behind Off The Grid, secure backing from VanEck, building on the $517 million in Q3 funding raised by gaming startups.

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A new wave of blockchain and tokenization projects is helping African farmers access revenue, investments and loans to build better lives.

Blockchain technology is planting the seeds of change in Africas farming sector, providing solutions to long-standing barriers like market access, financial limitations and fair pricing.

For farmers like Sophia Wambui Ngamate from Nakuru County, Kenya, aged 54, it has been a lifeline. One Million Avocados has wonderfully assisted me in planting more than 120 avocado trees in my shamba, she says of the Kenyan crypto project that uses orchard tokenization to further an aim to plant a million avocado trees across Africa.  

Theyve trained me, linked me to other farmers, provided fertilizers, and are even helping us access better markets, she says.

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AI agents trading crypto is the hot new narrative, but beware of getting sniped, legal and security issues, and being fooled by humans.

The use of AI agents to create, promote and transact cryptocurrencies has been largely theoretical until now.

But with AI shitposter Terminal of Truths promoting Goateus Maximus, the Luna bot tipping users for engagement, and Based Agents enabling quick and easy crypto agent creation on Ethereum L2s, the future has become very real all of a sudden.

The developments have brought a fresh wave of excitement to Crypto X, with some wondering if AI agents transacting in crypto could be the narrative that propels (at least in part) the next retail bull run.

But there are also plenty of traps for young players in the AI agent craze.

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The ETHSafari crypto conference in Kenya is a world away from Token2049… and a completely different mindset.

The six-hour train journey from Nairobi, Kenyas capital, to the coastal city of Mombasa is a pleasant one. Clean carriages, very well-dressed passengers and a punctual timetable make a nice change from the uncertainty of traveling in Africa. 

Opening in 2017, it replaced a colonial-era railway line known as the Lunatic Express, which is fitting enough when headed to any sort of crypto event. 

My destination, two more hours by car from Mombasa, is ETHSafari in Kilifi, a paradise-like town on the coast, but Im early. Theres yet another Block Train to the second part of the conference the following day. 

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Magazine follows a trail of clues left behind by the fake Rabby Wallet scammer to uncover a network of scams and links to a Dubai crypto CEO.

Unsuspecting users lost an estimated $1.6 million to a fake cryptocurrency wallet that somehow slipped through Apples strict app review process in February. Magazine follows a trail of clues on the blockchain to find out who’s behind the fake wallet.

The fraudulent app, posing as DeBanks Rabby Wallet, remained on the App Store for four days, siphoning funds from multiple victims before Apple removed it.

I never once thought it would be a scam since I had complete faith in the Apple App Store. About 20 to 30 minutes later, I opened my Rabby laptop wallet and saw my balance had basically gone to zero, a fake Rabby wallet victim tells Magazine. 

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