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When US president<\/span> Donald Trump launched his own meme cryptocurrency<\/a> on January 17, days before his return to the White House, I was halfway up a Swiss alp, attending a crypto conference in the town of St. Moritz.<\/p>\n Memecoins, which typically have no purpose beyond financial speculation, were having a moment<\/a>. The previous year, millions of new memecoins<\/a> had flooded the market; a few, like Fartcoin<\/a>, had rocketed to billion-dollar valuations. Pump.Fun<\/a>, a platform for launching and trading memecoins, had become one of the fastest-growing crypto launchpad businesses<\/a> ever. Now, the soon-to-be president was getting in on the act.<\/p>\n Over lunch on the second day of the conference, beneath the ornate stucco ceiling and golden chandeliers of the venue\u2019s dining hall, I located a table designated for a conversation about memecoins. Whereas other tables were half full, the memecoin workshop was oversubscribed; latecomers pulled up chairs to create two full rows.<\/p>\n The discussion was led by Nagendra Bharatula, founder of investment firm G-20 Group. Bharatula had recently coauthored a paper<\/a> arguing that memecoins, despite their juvenile spirit, had a place in professional investors\u2019 portfolios. In the six months prior, a basket of 25 \u201cbluechip memecoins\u201d\u2014an oxymoron if ever there was one\u2014had outperformed bitcoin by 150 percent, he pointed out. Some of the attendees murmured their approval.<\/p>\n Since then, the shine has come off the memecoin market. The paper value of Trump\u2019s coin, which climbed to a peak of $14 billion<\/a> two days after its launch, has cratered to roughly $1 billion<\/a>. Hundreds of thousands of small investors lost their shirts<\/a>. Pump.Fun\u2019s daily revenue, a proxy for the overall appetite for memecoin trading, is barely more than a tenth of what it was<\/a> in January. The memecoin gold rush has spawned a raft of litigation<\/a>.<\/p>\n Next up: the stablecoin. If memecoins are symbolic of reckless abandon<\/a> and unflinching profiteering<\/a> in cryptoland, stablecoins are a symbol of the industry\u2019s search for purpose and respectability. Designed to hold a steady $1 valuation, stablecoins are pitched by proponents as a faster and cheaper way to make everyday payments and international money transfers.<\/p>\n In a year in which the US has declared itself open for crypto business<\/a>, where previously crypto firms feared regulatory backlash<\/a> under the Biden administration, stablecoins have supplanted memecoins as the coin \u00e0 la mode\u2014and punctured the mainstream.<\/p>\n Though stablecoins have been around since 2014<\/a>, they have predominantly been used by crypto traders<\/a> as a safe harbor during bouts of market volatility, not by regular people. The concept has also faced resistance from regulators skeptical of a new form of money; Diem, a stablecoin venture incubated at Meta, famously shuttered in 2022<\/a> in the face of broad-based opposition.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n