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

On a recent afternoon in otherwise sleepy Bel Air, where multimillion-dollar mansions disappear behind walls of tangled bougainvillea, two security guards, handguns at their hips, pace before a tall black gate, keeping watch over a cutting-edge social experiment: the marriage of influencer culture and meme coin speculation.

Inside, caterers pass out coconuts to Love Island cast members who lounge in glittering bikinis, prepping to film sponsored content. Everyone is beautiful, bronzed, and carefully composed for the camera. At the head of a long table sits Jade Watson, a redheaded content producer, drafting a prediction- markets-for-dummies campaign based on the long-term romantic prospects of the reality show’s couples: Buy, hold, or sell?

“Everyone always says, ‘I wish I got into Bitcoin back in the day when everyone was making money,’” says Roman Hossain, the project’s elusive founder. “But with meme coins, we see those kinds of returns every single week.”

“What we’re doing is simplifying trading terms,” Watson says. “But we’re using the language Gen Z already speaks.”

Downstairs, in a room of wall-to-wall windows overlooking dusty canyons sloping out to the Los Angeles skyline, four traders sit before massive monitors. The screens are filled with charts and numbers. It looks like a tiny Wall Street trading floor with a patio bar and infinity pool attached. Webcams are fixed on the traders, livestreaming to an invisible online audience. There’s a DJ.

Welcome to Meme House LA.

While the reality stars upstairs possess the hyperreal beauty bestowed by an Instagram filter, these traders look like regular people. But they, too, are participants in a reality show: a 24/7 livestream about themselves—the meme coin traders live in a mansion that reportedly sold two years back for some $18 million. The goal of the project is to turn each of these traders into what is called a KOL, or key opinion leader: an influencer who moves markets. One of the most famous KOLs was Roaring Kitty, the red-headband-wearing YouTuber who made millions rallying his followers, like Reddit’s r/wallstreetbets, to invest in Gamestop.

“What I want,” says Roman Hossain, the project’s elusive founder, surveying the scene, “is to create eight Roaring Kitties.”

Meme House LA is cross-pollinating two internet species: meme coin traders and influencers, who socialize at extravagant parties.

Hossain is dressed in the costume of California comfort: bare feet peeking out beneath white jeans, a tan polo spun from natural-looking fiber, and, on his wrist, a Rolex. Hossain says he made his fortune in crypto currencies like Bitcoin. Out in the driveway sit two Lamborghinis, a Ferrari F8 Tributo, and a Rolls-Royce.

“Everyone always says, ‘I wish I got into Bitcoin back in the day when everyone was making money,’ ” states Hossain. “But with meme coins, we see those kinds of returns every single week.”

Meme House LA and its occupants represent one of the stranger phenomena of the postpandemic internet: the emergence of a financial ecosystem cobbled together from Telegram group chats, Discord channels, and Twitter DMs—where millions are made and lost by people who in a previous era would have had little access to or interest in the markets. It is all centered on an asset that has no clear function or utility. But it is powered by the most valuable tender on the planet: attention.

With Meme House LA, Hossain is cross-pollinating two internet species: meme coin traders and influencers, who socialize at extravagant parties featuring celebrity guests, fire dancers, and catering from Nobu. The celebrities and influencers deliver the audience; the meme coin traders provide the education: teaching young people how to make millions betting on just about everything, from their favorite Love Island couple to the enduring popularity of Labubus.

If all goes according to plan, the Bel Air mansion will be Hossain’s first outpost in a network catering to this emerging audience. “Meme House LA may become Meme House Miami or Meme House Dubai,” he says.

But for this project to take off, it needs the same brand of oxygen that everything online demands. “Right now, we want eyeballs,” Hossain says. “We need eyeballs.”

Back in January it felt like everyone was about to get really, really rich. “We are in for face-melting growth,” Alex Taub, the founder of the fantasy IP brand Goblintown who has long dabbled in cryptocurrencies, tells me at the time. “This is the 1990s stock market. A monkey could throw a dart at a wall of stocks and make money.” And it only seemed destined to continue. The incoming president was not only crypto-friendly, he had plans to mint his own meme coin. So did the president’s wife. In September, when World Liberty Financial, a crypto venture led by the president and his three sons, launched a new coin, the family’s holdings surpassed $5 billion on paper. “The running joke,” says Taub, “goes like this: You have the next four years to retire your entire bloodline.”

From the outside, it all looked too stupid to take off. Cartoon avatars shilling “Fartcoins” as a kind of currency. Bettors waging millions on whether or not a politician would wear a suit. Financial markets have always been something of a game, but they were a game for smart people, like chess. These new financial games were simpler, demanding all the intellectual rigor of Candy Crush. Being stupid, actually, was good. “The dumber you are, the more money you make,” says Taub. Still, it seemed far-fetched that these games might constitute any kind of economic viability.

“This is one of the largest wealth-creation events for young people in history,” says Zara, a 28-year-old crypto trader who lives on a cannabis farm in Northern California that she and her partner bought with their crypto winnings. Just how much money is churning through these markets is difficult to say, but in the past year, an insulated online economy has risen from a thicket of wallets and exchanges where fortunes are won—and lost—within a matter of minutes. On a Sunday in early August when crypto markets were down, the leaderboard of a crypto-wallet-tracking website called Kolscan was topped by “Pain,” a trader who, as of that day, had made just over $60,000 trading meme coins. But this was nothing compared to “Cupsey,” a figure of legend in the world of meme coin traders who, according to the site, had netted $1.5 million in a month.

Bouts of crazed crypto-stoked frenzy have happened before, including with NFTs and, before that, ICOs. Both of those have largely fizzled out. But the formerly clunky tech powering the creation of new kinds of money has gotten faster, slicker. Now anyone can create a meme coin from their laptop without even a cursory understanding of a blockchain. Millions more could buy it. Sending a payment in cryptocurrency is about as challenging as ordering a T-shirt off Amazon.

I began taking investment advice from an amphibian avatar named “Fwog Bonner.”

These markets are fueled, in part, by the uneasy sense that the entire economy is imploding from the inside out. Sure, things look good according to the stock market, but on the ground, it feels bleak. These days a normal job can only get you so far, and the average salary can’t get you anything that really matters. Certainly not a house and probably not your medical treatments, child care, or college.

“There’s a feeling that if you don’t dip your toe in the game, you may not be able to afford an apartment in the future,” a communications adviser at a cryptocurrency-focused venture firm tells me. “These kids and their gambling, it won’t end well. The financial establishment will realize that this isn’t about gambling or degeneracy. It’s about so much more than that.”

What it’s about, exactly, is not readily apparent from the Meme House LA trading floor, where the prospective key opinion leaders are clicking furiously between screens of rising and falling numbers. This is, in meme coin parlance, what’s called “the trenches.”

The top trader at Meme House LA is Sunny. He is middle-aged, raspy-voiced, and heavily tattooed. Hundred-dollar bills circle his forearm, snaking up toward his biceps. On X he sometimes posts about how meme coins changed his life. “I WAS TOLD AFTER PRISON I WOULD NEVER AMOUNT TO ANYTHING. THE TRENCHES CHANGED THAT #trap2trenches” reads a recent tweet. Along with the text is a photo, a stack of twenties fanned across a keyboard with the words: “COMPUTER MONEY.”

Sunny is monitoring a trade of a meme coin called HONK, which bears a cartoon goose holding a bat. Sunny hopes the goose will catch on and he’ll multiply his initial investment of roughly one Solana, which, on this day, is worth around $160. So far he’s lost $30, but things could reverse in minutes.

Part of meme coin’s broad appeal is that it doesn’t take much cash to get started. A typical coin launches at fractions of a cent. Catch one before it hits mainstream, and you stand to multiply your money many times over. Sunny is still reeling from another missed opportunity. “Just wait until I show you how I fucked this up,” he says, opening the chart for a meme coin that’s a cartoon cat dressed in a fedora and a trench. Initially he’d invested $80 when the market cap was $13,000. When the market dropped to $8,000, he pulled out. But hours later the cat in the fedora had skyrocketed to a market cap of $600,000. Had he stayed in the trade a little longer, he would have made—he calculates the math on his phone—$3,846: “Off $80.”

Sunny got into meme coins in November, when a guy he knows who racked up millions running a weed distribution center—“everything legal”—quit cold turkey to focus on trading meme coins full-time. The guy introduced him to a group chat, and Sunny locked himself in his house for days and studied. Soon after, Sunny quit his job as a personal trainer to dedicate himself to trading.

“Then I sat around, started getting chubby,” he says, rubbing his belly.

There are all kinds of names for what to call the new online economy of speculation, meme stocks, and meme trading: attention economy, lottery economy, casino economy, the tokenization of everything, the financialization of everything. But my favorite is from an essay by an investor who writes under the byline Thiccythot on Substack. Thiccythot calls it “the jackpot age,” an era in which just about everyone believes that with the right amount of risk and luck, they, too, can get stupid rich.

“There is a survivor bias in crypto, where the winners are the ones telling the story,” says Andy Folio, a videographer who spends some 18 hours a day leverage-trading cryptocurrencies. “Same with the entertainment industry: The winners are the ones on stage telling you to chase your dreams. The gamblers on Twitter are like, ‘Don’t stop clicking!’ Kids these days feel the only way to make it is through gambling.”

In November I was drawn to the irresistible lure myself during a visit to my hairdresser. Over a head of highlights, he told me in great detail about all the coins he’d been buying. He had parked some $200,000 in a cryptocurrency that everyone was talking about at the time, as well as tens of thousands more in a popular meme coin. He had done all this on the advice of one of his clients, a guy who, according to my hairdresser, had made identical trades. “This guy,” my hairdresser said, wielding a stack of foil, “put in millions.”

Up until this point I wasn’t the kind of person who would take random investment advice from my hairdresser, talented though he may be in the art of balayage. But since the pandemic I’d had a creeping sense that the rules no longer applied. The system was rigged and ready to break. Among my friends it was a running joke: “Might as well enjoy ourselves before we’re all living in bunkers!”

That night I went home and put $7,000—a not-insubstantial sum to a freelance journalist—on the cryptocurrency my hairdresser recommended. In just under a month, I nearly doubled my money.

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

The next month, I downloaded a wallet and learned how to track meme coins on DEX Screener. I was now closely monitoring a private group chat that Taub invited me to on X called “It’s Time to Nut.” I began taking investment advice from an amphibian avatar named “Fwog Bonner.”

But I found that trading meme coins wasn’t something I could do casually. I’d step away from my laptop for a few moments to take a phone call or run an errand and find that the hundred or so dollars I’d put on a coin had evaporated. After shaving a few thousand off my initial winnings, I lost my appetite and gave up. I had only tasted a fraction of the pain meme coin losses can incur. The $30,000 that Zara, the crypto trader who lives on the cannabis farm, put into meme coins directly out of her savings grew, at its peak, to $1.7 million. Then the market nuked “and I kept trading down,” she says. “I was like, Let me just average out here—and then I was left with nothing, with dust.”

While I only traded meme coins a few short weeks, it permanently scrambled the way I thought about finance and money. For one, it readjusted my appetite for risk. Cryptocurrencies now felt slow, the stock market glacial. Yet the most unexpected development was this: My understanding of money was now completely abstracted. It was numbers on a screen that went up and down.

An entire generation has come to think about money this way. “To young people, money has always been fake numbers on the internet,” a cryptocurrency business founder tells me. And because these numbers are tied to an online economy made up of trivial jokes and crude cartoons, losing it can feel just as surreal as winning. This was true for Vanessa Sierra, a former Love Island Australia contestant who, after losing $100,000 in a few short days, was left only momentarily speechless. “Had it happened with real money, it would have affected me a lot more,” she says. “If it was in my bank account, I would be crying for days.”

Everything is a market in some sense,” says Austin Adams, the founder of an on-chain markets company called Whetstone Research. “If you’re not thinking about it as a market, someone else is thinking about it for you. You post on Facebook and Instagram and say ‘This isn’t a market,’ but it is. There’s a market being run in the background on an ad exchange that’s demanding your attention. We have to admit this is a market and that someone else is extracting that value through something else.”

It used to be that the value of an investment was tied to its perceived usefulness or performance. But all this changed with the arrival of meme stocks. These stocks typically represented companies that were not particularly useful or promising. But they were valuable for one important reason: People on the internet talked about them a lot.

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.”

I tell her it all sounds a bit like Squid Game, the TV show about poor people who play deadly children’s games in order to win a prize fronted by wealthy spectators.

“It is, yeah!” she says—brightly. “It’s very similar.”

Stefanie Stantcheva, a professor of economics at Harvard University, has documented an explosive uptick in the US in “zero-sum thinking,” what she describes as a “mindset that if you or a group of people wins, it must mean that someone else loses.” This belief has grown on a drastic scale, especially among young people who experience less upward mobility than previous generations. “Today, many people think that their jobs are much worse than their parents’, and that good jobs are just not attainable to them, which is driving this idea that [their] job will not be sufficient to give [them] an income,” she says.

“I’m just trying to break out of the matrix, man,” Vara, a meme coin trader at Meme House LA, tells me. “I don’t want a nine-to-five job for the rest of my life. I see so much money in this market being thrown around every day. Why not learn how to reach in and grab some?”

During the five hours that I visited the Meme House LA, the meme coin traders, including Vara, rarely left their desks. There they sat, for hours, clicking and clicking away. Sometimes I check in on their live streams, where I watch them performing on-camera challenges, partying on a yacht, and of course, trading meme coins, chasing the jackpot.