Moonshot, the Solana-based app promising meme coin creation as easy as a TikTok post, is undeniably capturing Gen Z's imagination. 100,000 daily users in January 2025, projections of 20 million by year's end, and daily revenues of $330,000 from coin creation – the numbers scream success. But behind the flashing lights and viral potential lies a fundamental question: are we witnessing the dawn of a new, empowered creator economy, or the reckless propagation of financial instruments destined to leave a generation burned?
Easy Coins Equals Easy Money?
The allure is obvious. Upload a selfie, choose your stock or crypto ticker, and boom, you’re an investment tycoon (at least in theory). Moonshot’s incorporation with Solana’s super quick transactions and track-coach affordable fees promise a lot smoother. Apple Pay integration? Genius. It seems more like purchasing in-game perks, crossing the frontier between gaming and investing.
Here's where the unexpected connection comes in: remember the dot-com boom? Everyone with a website was a “tech entrepreneur,” and fortunes were made (and lost) literally overnight. Moonshot feels eerily similar. All the ease of creation does is guarantee that there will be more worthless coins. And more coins means more opportunity for scams.
Think about it. You simply design a coin in a matter of minutes. So what’s preventing these malicious actors from pumping-and-dumping cryptocurrencies, rug-pulling unsuspecting investors, and disappearing into the digital ether with their ill-gotten gains? Moonshot’s commitment to audit each new coin is an industry-leading move that sets a new precedent. Yet, what audit could possibly stay ahead of the more than 1,500 new coins being created daily? Moreover, audits are not insurance.
Is This a Financial Fad?
Unique features further enhance Moonshot’s vision of becoming the “New CoinMarketCap,” curating the best meme coins while filtering out the noise. Even if you had an expertly curated list of 100-200 coins, the market’s inherent volatility makes this meme coin logic unsound. Indeed, ninety percent of meme coins are dead within a few weeks. That’s not investing, that’s gambling with a middleman.
This isn’t merely the risk of lost revenue, it’s the risk of creating a vortex of financial panic and mistrust. If Gen Z’s initial experience with crypto is a rug pull, their confidence will be shaken. This would have an outsized effect on their proclivity to experiment with real blockchain use cases down the road. In doing so, are we really poisoning the well for the whole Web3 ecosystem while chasing positives and creating accessibility at the cost of responsibility?
Consider the broader economic implications. Meanwhile, a huge percentage of Gen Z’s disposable income is funneled into highly speculative meme coins. This trend has the potential to profoundly impact more conventional investments such as equities and fixed-income securities. Will it worsen current wealth disparities, or open new doors to wealth-building and financial independence?
Regulation or Rug Pulls?
Moonshot’s reliance on Solana could cut both ways. Ever since its 2023 upgrades, Solana has enjoyed essential stability. Even a brief outage under stress during a market frenzy might trigger panic selling and result in catastrophic losses. What about regulatory scrutiny? Bans already launched in China and the long-promised ban in India underline the potential for geographical limitations. Ensuring responsible innovation, the EU’s MiCA regulations are already looming large, promising to establish more burdensome compliance requirements that would altogether deter innovation.
The libertarian ethos that dominates much of the crypto space is fundamentally incompatible with basic investor protection. The architect of Moonshot’s creator economy model — in which creators earn a cut of trading fees — incentivizes virality at all costs. What’s the incentive to learn how to teach people about managing risks? Where is the emphasis on responsible investing?
We need to ask ourselves: is Moonshot truly democratizing finance, or is it merely gamifying it, turning financial markets into a giant, unregulated casino? The truth, I would guess, is somewhere in the middle. Moonshot should aim in particular to investor education, risk mitigation, and regulatory compliance. Otherwise, we risk a future of it becoming a cautionary tale – a chaotic Web3 Wild West, where fortunes are created and evaporated across memes, leaving one generation disillusioned and another financially marred.
We need a new conservative approach, one that puts a premium on innovation while embracing prudence on accessibility while embracing accountability. We believe it’s a worthy investment not because the future of finance should be one TikTok finance influencer’s post away from collapse.
