Likely Normal

We can’t go through the Halloween season without mentioning a mummy or two, especially those pyramid-scheming crypto jerks from the 25th dynasty. Cryptocurrency has officially reached the “throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks” phase of its existence. Every day, some anonymous Twitter account with a laser-eyed profile pic announces a revolutionary new coin, promising it will “disrupt the financial system” while secretly being worth less than the gas fees required to buy it. We’ve reached peak absurdity: if you can slap “decentralized” and “Web3” onto a white paper, congratulations—you, too, can launch a token backed by nothing but vibes and the collective delusion of crypto bros.

Remember when crypto was just Bitcoin, and people mined it on their laptops like it was a fun little science experiment? Now, we’ve got coins for everything. Dog memes? Check. Random nouns misspelled with extra Z’s? Obviously. A token that somehow ties into a YouTuber’s merch line? To the moon! It’s like the dot-com bubble, but instead of Pets.com, we’ve got llamacoins and catcoins that have no basis for their value.

And the whitepapers? Oh, they’re masterpieces of jargon-filled nonsense. “Utilizing a synergistic deflationary burn mechanism with cross-chain interoperable governance tokens, we’re pioneering the future of decentralized liquidity farming.” Translation: “We made this up while waiting for our Uber Eats, and if you buy in early, maybe you can dump it on someone else before it crashes.”

Half these projects don’t even pretend to have utility anymore. At least in 2017, scamcoins tried to pretend they were for file storage or cloud computing. Now? There’s no roadmap, no promises; just vibes. And somehow, it still pumps—because nothing fuels financial mania like the fear of missing out on the next thing that’s definitely not a Ponzi scheme (but walks, talks, and rug pulls like one).

So here we are, in a world where your barista has an NFT project and your cousin won’t shut up about his life-changing investment in a coin that sounds like a Pokémon sneeze. Will 99% of these tokens be worthless in a year? Absolutely. But hey, in the crypto casino, everyone’s a genius… until the music stops. Just remember: If a project’s biggest selling point is “we’re not like those other scams,” maybe—just maybe—it’s exactly like those other scams.