Meet the MemeCoin Traders Risking Everything to Retire Their “Whole Bloodline”

Attention has always been valuable but difficult to price. A blue check on Instagram promises credibility; a large follower count or a viral moment can open a world of opportunity. Attract as many eyeballs as you like, but there was never any way to cash in on the gaze itself. “So it’s just the next phase,” says Bark, a crypto influencer who, according to a woman who knows him, is running what amounts to “a full-blown cult” on X. (“Anything he tells his audience to do, they’ll do,” she says. “You make people money, they’ll worship you.”)

“Having clout and followers and blue check marks had value, but there was no way you could put a dollar on it,” Bark continues. “Now we’re putting a dollar on it.”

This may be why people who spend most of their time making products that live on the internet are drawn to the world of crypto, where even micro-influencers can create tokens tied to their online popularity.

One such influencer is a guy called Fluffy, who, when I met him at Meme House LA, gave the impression of an ebullient, larger-than-life Nintendo Mario, dressed in red-and-white-striped overalls and a red cap. Fluffy has his own meme coin, which, he says, “is so stressful because my face is on it. If this coin goes bad, it ruins my whole persona in Web3.” When Fluffy starred in a commercial for a crypto company called Bullpen earlier this year, his token’s total value increased from $28,000 to $40,000 because, as he puts it, “people saw me as the commercial, they saw that I was actually putting in work trying to entertain the world, which correlated to the token getting bought, and that makes me feel good.”

There is an annoying problem with the nature of attention, however. It tends to alight on the collective imagination with seemingly capricious randomness. But what if you could control where attention was headed next? This, in the view of Amy Street, a former kindergarten teacher who became a crypto influencer after flipping two NFTs for a combined $18,000, is the current trajectory. “I’m not in control of whether or not Elon Musk uses the phrase DOGE over and over again or if Labubus are cool in two months,” she says. “But I do control if I’m gonna get a tattoo of an eggplant on my stomach. And if there is money on the line, people are gonna do some crazy stuff. Bull runs create hunger for money, and people do crazy things and put up a lot of money.”

That comment about the eggplant tattoo is something Street picked up from a crypto company she’s working with called Dare Market, which has yet to launch. The idea is in the name: a market of dares where people pay bounties that others cash in on by recording themselves performing crowdsourced challenges. These dares, according to the company’s founder, Isla Rose Perfito, a bubbly blond 29-year-old living in New York, could include things like breaking into a Scientology center, moving into a McDonald’s for 24 hours, and getting people to streak at the Super Bowl. “The goal,” says Perfito, “is to break the internet. It’s like Black Mirror/Jackass coded but still super relatable. It’ll give you the feeling that you can change the world and the adrenaline rush of driving a fast car.”