AltcoinsLearning
|6 min ReadWelcome to the Golden Age of Asset Bubbles
Jax Morales
Senior Analyst
Published
Jan 16, 2026
A good bubble used to build railways, cables, or canals.
Today’s bubbles leave nothing but screenshots of peak prices. Not even a tulip bulb to show for it.
We’re living in a mania fueled by influence, hype, and behavioral addiction.
Self-proclaimed visionaries celebrate their worthless tokens like badges of honor. And somehow, we keep letting insiders walk away rich while latecomers are left holding risk — and a lottery ticket’s odds of return.
When headlines become investments
Marshal McLuhan once said, “The medium is the message.”
He didn’t live to see crypto Twitter.
A shooting hits the news, and within hours, a new memecoin — RIPCharlieKirk — launches. It’s one of over ten thousand scams with the same name. The token shot from near zero to a $5 million cap in a day, before collapsing to a fifteenth of its peak. A few lines of code, a JPEG, no value, no yield — only a name and a story.
A Florida trader told Bloomberg he bought
17,000 loss, and bought back in again. The insiders lit the fuse. The crowd poured gasoline. Most of these coins are already dead or dying. The rest survive on hopium. And every round ends the same way — insiders cash out, believers double down.Useless Coin soared fortyfold in days, reaching a $320 million market cap. Its purpose? None. That’s the point. The only utility is enriching insiders.
Thousands of traders keep betting anyway. Because the rush is irresistible.
Not all bubbles are created equal
Old bubbles built something.
The dot-coms left fiber networks. The railway mania left tracks. Even Global Crossing, a collapse of biblical scale, still strung cables that power the modern web.
But memecoins and memestocks? They build nothing. No IP, no infrastructure, no Chapter 11 recoveries. Just wealth transfer from outsiders to insiders. The asset is the joke. The exit is the business.
It’s always been this way. History is the story of pump and dump.
From Vancouver’s Howe Street in the VSE days, to Stratton Oakmont cold calls, to the spam email era — “APPM TO A DOLLAR!!!” — the script never changes. SPAC promoters made tens of millions, while their stocks cratered 99%. Virgin Galactic sent Branson to space, and Chamath walked away with $315 million. Retail got wrecked.
The new boom, same old tricks
Now it’s back. SPACs reborn as “Crypto Treasury Companies.” Cantor Equity Partners once traded at 25x its asset value, then crashed 96%, even as Bitcoin hit all-time highs.
And memecoins? They’ve evolved. Keith Gill — Roaring Kitty himself — returned for Memestock 2.0. But this time, promoters learned. If your product is designed to be worthless, no one can argue about fundamentals.
Every day, hundreds of new coins launch. Even the White House got memed. **
1, ripped past
350 million. SPACs with better branding.On Solana’s Pump.fun, 60% of wallets lose money, 81% of tokens fall over 90%. Only 0.4% of traders make more than $10,000. Fraud flags are everywhere — 98.6% of Pump.fun launches show signs of manipulation. And yet the casino stays open.
DOGE and SHIB still hold tens of billions in value. We’re in Dogecoin’s third bull run — $40 billion market cap and counting. Even the joke refuses to die.
Bigger fools. Stronger dopamine.
Why buy when you know it’s worthless? Because the game hits the same brain circuits as slot machines.
Tiny bets feel safe. Instant feedback hits fast.
One in twenty might win big. And your group chat won’t stop talking about that one guy who did. That’s how the cycle resets.
It’s not ignorance. It’s addiction.
The charts, the airdrops, the notifications — they’re designed to keep you spinning. The product isn’t crypto. It’s dopamine.
The new casinos
Casinos used to have chips, carpets, and cocktails.
Now they fit in your hand, wrapped in push notifications and meme coins.
Finance has become a video game.
Robinhood joined the S&P 500 the same week Caesars Entertainment got dropped. ICE — the world’s biggest futures exchange — just invested in Polymarket, a sports betting and prediction platform. Wall Street and Vegas are now neighbors.
Every trade whispers the same thing: one more spin.
The moral, if you can call it that
Old bubbles mispriced dreams but left behind progress.
Today’s meme-fueled frenzy misprices nothing — it’s built to extract, not to build. Insiders mint, hype, dump. The rest screenshot the wreckage.
This is legalized boiler-room finance for the social media age.
A dopamine economy where addiction replaces innovation.
It looks like fun. Until you realize it’s the same game, with new code — and everyone still thinks they’re the lucky one.
Disclaimer: This document is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. The views expressed in this document are not, and should not be taken as, investment advice or recommendations. Recipients should do their own due diligence, taking into account their specific financial circumstances, investment objectives and risk tolerance, which are not considered here, before investing. This document is not an offer, or the solicitation of an offer, to buy or sell any of the assets mentioned.