The fact that a dog coin is in crypto’s top 10 should make us question what “utility” actually means

I made this piece while thinking about something I find both fascinating and slightly embarrassing about crypto.

We spent years telling people that tokens needed utility to justify their value. Projects built increasingly complicated ecosystems around their tokens: governance, staking, DeFi, infrastructure, payments, interoperability, etc. The implication was that the market would eventually distinguish “real” crypto from useless speculation.

Then memecoins came along and basically said: what if we just get everyone to believe in the same stupid thing?

And somehow, that worked. The fact that a dog coin can sit among the top cryptocurrencies by market capitalization is almost comical/ironical when you compare it to how seriously the industry talks about technological utility.

But maybe that's precisely why it's interesting. Memecoins stripped away much of the intellectual packaging and demonstrated how powerful community, attention, memes, and collective belief can be. The “delusion” itself becomes a social mechanism: enough people believe, participate, promote and speculate, and suddenly the thing has economic significance and eventually becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

That does make me wonder whether utility was ever the fundamental difference maker we thought it was. Maybe utility can create a reason for people to participate, but collective belief is what ultimately turns that participation into value.

So.

What do we make of a dog coin sitting in the top 10? Is it proof that the market is irrational, or proof that we've misunderstood what actually gives these assets value?

Maybe the funniest part is that the dog coin might actually be telling us more about crypto than the projects with 50-page whitepapers.

If a meme with a dog can outperform projects built around supposedly revolutionary utility, maybe we should rethink what we're actually measuring when we talk about “value” in crypto.

And if that's true, isn't the dog coin near the top of the market actually one of the most honest representations of what crypto is?

Is the existence of a top-10 dog coin a ridiculous anomaly, or is it one of the clearest demonstrations that crypto value has always been primarily a social phenomenon?

At the end of the day, perhaps what matters most isn't the asset's supposed utility, but its memetic strength, cultural relevance, and the ability of its community to sustain collective belief.

If that's the case, what happens when the next major phenomenon in crypto isn't built around some revolutionary technology, but around memetics, culture, and the ability to make millions of people believe in the same idea?