Meme Coin National Day Roller Coaster: When Emotion Becomes Currency, Who Is Paying for Financial Freedom?

During the National Day holiday, the A-shares market was closed. While stock investors were stuck in highway traffic, the crypto world was already exploding.

A few inexplicable meme coins—Meme4, PALU, and one called “Binance Life”—saw their market caps multiply dozens of times in just a few days. Early entrants had millions of dollars on paper, people started flaunting screenshots in their friend circles, and crypto influencers on Twitter collectively lost their minds.

And then?

Starting October 9, it was a freefall. Some coins dropped 95% in a single day, over 100,000 people were liquidated, with a total amount of $621 million. Overnight riches quickly turned into tales of retail investors’ pain and loss.

If This Happened on Wall Street

Do you remember the GameStop saga in 2021?

Reddit retail traders sent the stock price of a nearly bankrupt game store to the moon, forcing short-selling institutions to lose everything. The chairman of the US SEC called it “a milestone in behavioral finance”—no matter how absurd the price, as long as trades are real and information is public, it’s “part of the market.”

The American logic: Let bubbles happen. Because bubbles are fuel for market evolution.

If a meme coin frenzy broke out on NASDAQ, what would happen? Wall Street would immediately launch a “Meme Stock ETF,” packaging social hype into a financial product; The Wall Street Journal would write long features praising “retail capitalism”; the SEC might research “social media manipulation,” but would probably conclude: this is not fraud, it’s a collective financial reaction driven by algorithms and social networks.

But if this happened in the A-shares market?

Regulators would issue risk warnings, the media would call for rational investing, and the whole event would be classified as “speculative anomaly,” used as an investor education case study. The underlying logic of the Chinese market is “seeking progress while maintaining stability”—buzz is fine, but there must be order; innovation is welcome, but you bear your own risk.

Meme Coins Live in a Third World

The magic of the crypto market is: it’s not regulated by the SEC, nor by the CSRC.

It’s a no man’s land. Code, liquidity, narrative—an experimental gray zone formed by self-organization.

The American-style mechanism of social speculation—information diffusion + collective momentum—and the Chinese-style grassroots wealth mentality—mass resonance + community frenzy—blend together in fascinating ways. Exchanges are no longer neutral platforms, but narrative engines; KOLs are no longer bystanders, but price amplifiers; retail investors revel and exhaust themselves in the loop of algorithms and consensus.

What’s the core shift?

Prices are no longer determined by cash flow, but by narrative velocity and consensus density. We are witnessing the birth of “emotional capital”—a new form of capital without financial statements, only cultural symbols; without fundamentals, only consensus curves; not pursuing rational returns, but chasing emotional amplification.

When Algorithms Fail, Emotion Becomes Currency

The data is clear: in the first nine months of 2025, 90% of top meme coins collapsed in market cap; in the second quarter, 65% of new tokens lost over 90% of their value within six months.

It’s like a digital-age gold rush. Most gold miners lose everything, only the shovel sellers always win.

Here’s the question: When money starts telling stories, the underlying logic of global finance is being rewritten.

In traditional markets, prices reflect value. In crypto markets, prices create value.

This is the ultimate in decentralization, but possibly also the extreme of irresponsibility. When narrative replaces cash flow, when emotion becomes an asset, each of us is a guinea pig in this experiment.

What’s the Way Out?

The Web3 industry stands at a crossroads.

Should it continue to indulge in the short-term frenzy of “emotional capitalism,” or shift to the long-term construction of a “value-driven ecosystem”?

The real way forward: strengthen community governance, introduce transparent regulatory frameworks, and establish investor education mechanisms. Only then can decentralized technology truly empower global financial fairness, instead of becoming a tool for a few to exploit the many.

The next time you see some influencer hyping a “100x coin,” ask yourself this:

Am I participating in financial innovation, or just paying for someone else’s financial freedom?

When money starts telling stories, what you need most isn’t FOMO—fear of missing out—but the ability to think calmly.