Meme coin National Day roller coaster: When emotions become currency, who is paying for the revelry?

During the National Day holiday, while A-share investors are still crowding in tourist attractions, the encryption world has already taken the roller coaster to new heights.

In the ecosystem of a leading trading platform, several Meme coins that sound like a joke—Meme4, PALU, and something called “Life on a Certain Platform”—have increased in market value dozens of times in just a few days. Some people casually made over a million dollars on paper, and the Chinese-speaking community is as lively as during the New Year, with cheers for “wealth codes” all over Twitter.

However, the good times did not last long.

Starting from October 9, these tokens fell like kites with broken strings, plummeting downwards. Some cryptocurrencies evaporated 95% in just one day, with over 100,000 accounts being liquidated, totaling $621 million.

The dream of overnight wealth turned into a collective stampede accident in the blink of an eye.

This scene is actually not fresh.

Wall Street has played the same game.

Do you remember GameStop in 2021? Retail investors on Reddit banded together to skyrocket the stock price of a nearly bankrupt game store, causing short sellers to question their existence. At the time, the chairman of the U.S. SEC said this was a “milestone in behavioral finance”—no matter how outrageous the price, as long as the trading is real and the information is public, it is part of the market.

Americans have a clear mindset: let the bubbles come as they should, because bubbles can drive market evolution.

What if this wave of Meme coins happened on Nasdaq? Wall Street would likely package a “social sentiment ETF” to turn Twitter hype into a quantitative factor; The Wall Street Journal would write a lengthy article discussing the “rise of retail capitalism”; the SEC might study whether “social media constitutes market manipulation,” ultimately concluding: this is not fraud, just a collective financial reaction of group sentiment through algorithms and social networks.

Change the place, and the story becomes completely different.

If “Some Platform Life” appears in the A-shares, regulators will issue a warning immediately, and the media will call for rationality. The whole incident will be defined as “speculative abnormal movement,” turning into a negative example of investor education. The underlying logic of the domestic market is “stability first”—it can be lively, but it must be orderly; innovation is welcome, but risks are borne by oneself.

Meme Coins Live in the Third World

The uniqueness of the encryption market lies in the fact that it is neither governed by the SEC nor regulated by the securities regulatory commission. This is a no man's land, a gray experimental field spontaneously formed by code, liquidity, and narrative.

Here, the American-style social speculation mechanism ( information goes viral + collective momentum ) and the Eastern-style mentality of grassroots wealth ( resonates + community fervor ) are magically fused together. The exchange is no longer a neutral referee, but a narrative operator; KOLs are no longer commentators, but price speakers; retail investors are enjoying themselves in the closed loop of algorithms and consensus, and also consuming themselves.

The most fundamental change is: prices are no longer determined by profitability, but by the speed of story dissemination and the density of consensus.

We are witnessing the birth of “emotional capital”—no financial reports, only cultural symbols; no fundamentals, only consensus curves; not pursuing rational returns, but only the emotional outburst of a new type of capital.

When algorithms collapse, emotions become currency

The numbers are brutal: In the first nine months before 2025, 90% of top meme coins will see their market value drop to zero; in the second quarter, 65% of new tokens will lose over 90% of their value within six months. It's like a digital gold rush, where most prospectors end up losing everything, and only those selling shovels make a guaranteed profit.

But the core of the problem is: when currency starts to tell a story, the underlying logic of global finance is being rewritten.

In traditional markets, prices reflect value; in the encryption market, prices create value. This is both the ultimate form of decentralization and potentially the dangerous boundary of de-responsibility. When narratives replace cash flow, and when emotions become assets, each of us becomes a participant in this experiment—or rather, a subject.

Where is the way out?

The Web3 industry is at a crossroads. Should it continue to indulge in the short-term frenzy of “emotional capitalism,” or should it shift towards the long-term construction of a “value-driven ecosystem?”

The true direction should be: strengthening community governance mechanisms, introducing a more transparent regulatory framework, and establishing a systematic investor education system. Only in this way can decentralized technology truly promote global financial fairness, instead of becoming a tool for a few to harvest.

The next time you see a big influencer crazily promoting a “hundredfold coin,” it might be wise to calmly ask yourself: Am I participating in financial innovation, or am I paying for someone else's financial freedom?

When currency learns to tell stories, what you need most is not FOMO( fear of missing out), but the ability to stay clear-headed. After all, in this game, the ones who end up paying the bill are often the last ones to enter.