In a sea of Crypto Bros are a bunch of Internet Kids.
Mid-to-late Millennials and early Zoomers that grew up with corded home phones, streetlights as the universal time to go inside, and vivid memories of using Yellow Pages.
Those same internet kids have memories of AIM messenger, Yahoo, Chat Roulette, MySpace, Tumblr, Vine, and the death of ethernet cables.
Being at the start of the social web (referred to as web2 in crypto), one could argue this is the first digital generation with regard to references, cultural diversity, and influence.
They are old enough to have analog memories, while simultaneously growing up within social technology.
Often the butt of the joke, they have determined many of the traditions in the digital space. From dunk and troll culture, to vlogging, pepe memes, all the way to national tv advertisements, corporate culture policy changes, and as of recent memory, American elections.
Crypto is theirs as well I’d argue. With Vitalik Buterin turning 30 in 2024, for example.
Enter Yap. Like Gap. As in yappers and yapping.
Created by Foda. An enigmatic internet kid with experience in music, fashion, design, and crypto. Yap is one of the countless SPL tokens, commonly known as memecoins, on Solana’s blockchain.
And just like its contemporaries, Yap was launched on the runaway-breakout application Pump.fun - generally called Pumpfun or Pump.
Unlike its contemporaries however, its founder has most recently placed a piece of merchandise (hat) on a Parisian runway in January 2025 alongside Kidsuper.
Yap is the first memecoin to exit the homey culdesac conversations of crypto (predominantly a fintech industry).
The waves this most recent runway show will have on crypto are minimal I’d imagine. It’s the start of something meaningful however.
Crypto brands focused on more than satire and infrastructure.
Things internet kids, who are becoming the market replacement for Baby Boomers, can get excited about. This is not something to thoughtlessly discount in my opinion.
The beauty of a macroeconomic guard change
It doesn't need to make sense, or convince, previous markets. Only the current and future ones.
Millennials and Gen Z are often describe as nihilistic, but absurdist is a more accurate representation.
With a certain level of tongue-in-cheek in most things they do, underneath the irony tends to be beliefs they deeply care about. Memecoins are no different.
On the surface they are:
created out of thin air
the most volatile financial asset in history
often the form factor for aggressively offensive humor
a breeding ground for theft & scams
built upon an unregulated & largely unproven tech stack
Dig a little deeper and you can see:
a platform for financial literacy
market commentary on nation state economics
next generation wealth creation vehicles
experiments in the merging of humanities & technologies industries
Memecoins like Yap, whether it is particularly successful or not, are showing that we’ll likely keep seeing the internet, and its kids, terraform culture and finance at global scales and gamer speeds.
