Memecoins x MasterCard?

Memeland just introduced MemePay.

At first glance, it’s nothing revolutionary. Just another crypto credit card (the MasterCard partnership is pretty impressive, tbh) right?

Wrong.

Because the whole key is that you can now pay for real-world stuff with memecoins — coins that traditionally aren’t recognised by the larger centralised exchanges (that they think aren’t worth their time/resources processing as a middleman).

The second thing is a cash rebate type system, in the form of surprise rewards. Just how you get Asia Miles for spending, MemePay will give you rewards for using their crypto credit card, in the form of web3-native “airdrops”.

Great way to retain users — and there is huge leverage for partners who are probably sponsoring token airdrops as they gain the adoption of a hardcore degenerate crowd who is memecoin-native.

So, what’s the big deal? It’s not like they’re the first crypto credit card (one that got really popular was the crypto .com card).

Well, the difference with MemePay is that Memeland gets to decide which memecoins they accept. Not only does this raise the value of $MEME (their native memecoin with “no utility”), they automatically gain adoption from existing memecoin communities like $PEPE, $FLOKI and $SHIB (assuming the coins featured in their announcement graphic will be accepted).

For reference, the market caps of the “memecoins” accepted in MemePay are:

$SHIB: 10B
$PEPE: 3.93B
$FLOKI: 1.37B
$MEME: 921M

Putting $MEME alongside that tier of tokens should raise its prestige a bit among the broader crypto community.

Not bad for ultra trash.

The other thing about MemePay is that it can position itself to be a SOL Incinerator type of service for memecoins. Got a big bag of memecoins in your wallet that you can’t be bothered to convert into ETH/SOL/USDT and then cash out? They’ll do it for you automatically (to my understanding, NOT a current feature but makes a lot of sense to add in the future) while taking a percentage of service fees.

I mean, this already exists in the real world where your pennies and coins are collected then the balance is deposited into your bank account, minus a service fee.

The UI/UX looks simple and easy enough, though it is currently only available for Android users.

To wrap this up, my final point is: not every company is in the position to launch a product like this, as simple as it seems.

First, you need the trust of the users who know that you won’t pull an FTX and rug the money stored in their accounts. For MasterCard to partner up with what is essentially a meme website and its subsidiary NFT project is huge. The track record of 9gag & reputation of CEO Ray Chan enables that.

Secondly, the incentive to set something like this up lies in increasing adoption of your own coin — that starts with $MEME which has already seen a slight increase in price since this announcement. If you have no skin in the game, you wouldn’t build infrastructure like this!

Last but not least is the awareness of the crypto space to know what’s hot and what’s not. Let’s face it: most crypto exchanges suck and only list things super late… or there’s some sort of insider knowledge before they list. Memeland has their ears to the ground and are both crypto-native and NFT-native. I’d trust them to know what’s going on more than the cabal at Binance or the SEC scrutinised folks at Coinbase.

And there you have it. MemePay — something that has Ray’s fingerprints all over it, something that’s simple yet elegant, this time themed after WindowsXP era technology but with its own little modern twist to it.

You can sign up for their waitlist at memepay.com (no, this is not a sponsored newsletter).

Excited to see what rewards they have in store for their users.

Until next time,

subvert

Your friendly neighbourhood cartoon cat