The Floki DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) responsible for managing the Floki (FLOKI) memecoin, has unanimously agreed to allocate a portion of the 16.3 billion Floki tokens from its community buyback wallet as liquidity for the upcoming Floki exchange-traded product (ETP).
Scheduled to launch in the first quarter of 2025, the Floki ETP will enable traditional finance investors in the European market to gain exposure to the memecoin, which is currently ranked as the 66th-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization on CoinMarketCap.
Following the approval of the community proposal, a spokesperson for Floki stated that the ETP listing would enhance the legitimacy of the community-driven memecoin:
“The Floki ETP will be listed on the SIX Swiss Exchange, the largest stock exchange in Switzerland and the third largest in Europe. This represents an almost unprecedented move to establish legitimacy for a memecoin.”
According to CoinGecko, memecoins were the second-best-performing crypto narrative of 2024, delivering an average return of approximately 2,185% to investors during the year. This performance was second only to artificial intelligence, which yielded an average return of around 2,939%.
Another CoinGecko study found that memecoins garnered the greatest attention among crypto investors in 2024, accounting for approximately 31% of total investor interest.
In October 2024, search interest in memecoins surpassed that of Bitcoin (BTC) on Google. Memecoins recorded a search interest score of 77 out of 100 for the month, while Bitcoin scored 33.
In November 2024, revenue from decentralized applications on Solana reached $365 million, primarily driven by Pump.fun, a platform for launching memecoins. Syndica, a research platform, revealed that the memecoin launchpad became the first Solana-based application to generate over $100 million in monthly revenue.
However, memecoins have also caused a significant divide within the crypto industry, with some individuals advocating for a shift towards utility rather than pure market speculation.
Former Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao expressed his views in a November 2024 Xpost, stating, “I am not against memes, but meme coins are getting ‘a little’ weird now. Let’s build real applications using blockchain.”