TradFi Hedge Funds Eyeing Memecoins As Subsector Evolves Into ‘Culture Coins’: Report

Hedge funds are starting to succumb to the lure of crypto memecoins in search of bigger gains, according to a report from Bloomberg.

Newport Beach, California-based fund Stratos – backed by heavyweight investors Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon – reportedly recorded 137% gains in Q1 by allocating part of its portfolio to dogwifhat (WIF), which is now the biggest memecoin on Solana (SOL).

Says Stratos’ founding partner Rennick Palley,

“The unspoken truth is that if the fund isn’t doing it, the people working at the fund are doing it.”

While memecoins essentially started as a joke – perhaps with the launch of Dogecoin (DOGE) in 2013 –the investor says that more hedge funds will inevitably start taking the sector more seriously as they become more comfortable with digital assets in general.

“People will become more comfortable with the concept over time, not dissimilar to how people became comfortable with crypto overall… I wouldn’t be surprised with firms creating meme-only funds, just as they created NFT-only funds.”

Cosmo Jiang, a portfolio manager at crypto hedge fund Pantera Capital, describes memecoins as “culture coins” that provide a sort of unofficial membership into a group or movement.

“Meme coins initially started as clearly a joke. But over time they’ve evolved as much more than that. People have started to call some memecoins as culture coins, they are a membership into a culture or a group of people with a shared belief system.”

Josh de Vos, research lead at researcher CCData, notes that liquidity and infrastructure in the memecoin sector is rapidly evolving, allowing firms from the traditional finance world who are more sensitive to low liquidity to get involved.

“Since the last cycle, the infrastructure surrounding memecoins has become more robust, with significant improvements in liquidity for several tokens… Centralized exchanges have developed sophisticated futures markets for leading memecoins, enabling hedge funds to capitalize on their volatile movements and effectively hedge their exposure.”

At time of writing, DOGE remains the largest memecoin with a $22 billion market cap, but faces competition from Shiba Inu (SHIB) at $15 billion and WIF at $3.2 billion.

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