“I don’t think it’s here to stay,” said Dave Portnoy, referring to Memes coins, the same corner of cryptography in which he has often poured fuel through his mischief of social networks.
Speaking on stage in consensus 2025 with Tom Farley, CEO of Crypto Exchange Bullish, the founder of Barstool Sports withdrew the layers of his short and chaotic period in the world of meme currency. With its usual shameless frankness, Portnoy described a journey of unexpected unexpected unexpected, legal land mines and the type of public reaction that could even make even the most hardened Internet provocater think twice.
“I love hurry, I’m a heart player,” he admitted. “But then the intelligent part of me is like, is it worth hate?” The conversation was part of a broader discussion about the culture of speculation and exaggeration of Crypto, where memes coins, tokens created more for jokes than in utility, have captured the imagination of young merchants and hungry of risk. Portnoy, who built barstool in a media empire on viral content and sports game, was swept in the same digital fever.
It started with Safemon, one of the first viral chips of the cryptographic boom of the Covid era. Portnoy saw publications on social networks about merchants who obtained profits of “9,000,000,000%”, bought, made a video mocking their lack of real value, and was sued anyway.
“They basically said that Safemoon paid me to promote them. Total Lie. It cost me $ 20K to get out of demand.” said.
Without flinching, he pushed more. Inspired by the idea of launching a barstool currency and omitting the discomfort of becoming public, Portnoy began investigating how memes currencies are made. That took him to a developer who launched a Token named Libra, allegedly backed by the president of Argentina.
Portnoy bought a value of $ 4.5 million.
“I was in SNL with Lady Gaga. I was writing. I’m like, what the hell is happening here?” said. The developer had told him that Elon Musk would tweet about it. Instead, the president rejected any participation. “I lost all my money.”
Portnoy says he was lucky: the developer then reimbursed it in its entirety, although he is not sure. “I am one of the lucky ones, but you know, I will not recover that money.”
Despite the losses, Portnoy continued to venture. Launched coins called Greed and Greed 2inclined to satire. Another currency, the prison, arose from public indignation in its meme coins experiments. Someone else created the Token, but Portnoy adopted the name and published about him. At one point, he says, an investment of $ 1,000 shot at $ 7 million, in an hour.
“It took me 13 years to earn that kind of money in Barstool,” he said.
But what goes up almost always narrows. Portnoy says that he has lost the notion of how many times he has been accused of “carpet pulls”, a term for when experts throw a coin and leave the newcomers with tokens without value.
He described meme coins as a manipulated game, dominated by a central group of early buyers with bots and commercial algorithms that know when to leave. “It is the same group of winners and is the same group of losers.”
That realization seems to have changed its appetite. Although he mocked the possible launch of Greed 3, he admitted that the reaction is more difficult to endure in real life. A man confronted him in a Las Vegas casino, claiming that he lost $ 200,000. “Everything is fun and games behind the computer, but that reinforces the people who are losing and earning real money, and do not always take responsibility for the risk, although I think they should.”
Despite money and memes, he says that the meme currency scene is ultimately unsustainable.
“I understand why people like it,” he said. “It is a form of play, it is a Ponzi scheme, I do not mean that in a negative way.”
Portnoy does not claim to have the answers. But if he is a meteorologist where Meme Coin Mania is heading, the prognosis looks gloomy. “I can’t imagine that I am here to stay. I think it’s here to stay for the next four years. What happens after that? I don’t know.”
