When US president Donald Trump launched his own meme cryptocurrency on January 17, days before his return to the White House, I was halfway up a Swiss alp, attending a crypto conference in the town of St. Moritz. Memecoins, which typically have no purpose beyond financial speculation, were having a moment. The previous year, millions of new memecoins had flooded the market; a few, like Fartcoin, had rocketed to billion-dollar valuations. Pump.Fun, a platform for launching and trading memecoins, had become one of the fastest-growing crypto launchpad businesses ever. Now, the soon-to-be president was getting in on the act. Over lunch on the second day of the conference, beneath the ornate stucco ceiling and golden chandeliers of the venue’s dining hall, I located a table designated for a conversation about memecoins. Whereas other tables were half full, the memecoin workshop was oversubscribed; latecomers pulled up chairs to create two full rows. The discussion was led by Nagendra Bharatula, founder of investment firm G-20 Group. Bharatula had recently coauthored a paper arguing that memecoins, despite their …