a cate and doge game

when memes first emerged in the late 2000’s, they were usually simple stick figures or a small set of images conveying relatable emotions to internet-savvy audiences. but with time they have evolved to be more or less a language of their own. in fact, it’s probably true that there is nothing in the world today that cannot be conveyed and almost universally recognised using the right set of memes. plenty of successful ‘meme pages’ also see their creators make a living off of this new language. now there’s a crypto token allowing individual contributors to get in on that act as well.

what is ‘Catecoin’ and should you be interested?

it’s in the name

over the past couple of years, a few crypto tokens that have little to no intrinsic business value have grown to humongous valuations. whether it’s the purely satirical ‘Dogecoin’ shilled heavily by Elon Musk and co. or the little utilised decentralised exchange platform ‘Shiba Inu’ which has grown on its tagline of being the ‘doge killer’. they are commonly referred to as ‘meme’ coins for their ability to be well, turned into memes. but they are no joke. at its peak, Dogecoin had a market cap of over $50 billion, higher than the likes of Doordash, Twitter, Philips, and more.

taking that tag to its literal extreme is Catecoin (aka CATE - a distortion of the word ‘cat’) whose primary utility is as payment/tips to creators of memes on its platform. it also allows users to sell those memes as NFTs to anyone who might be interested in buying them. further, CATE allows holders to “stake” ie. deposit their tokens on the platform and earn an annual interest rate of 15% as long as they do so for a minimum period of 31 days. if that weren’t enough, it redistributes 2% of the platform earnings (through commissions on payments, etc.) to its holders.

clawing its way

in order to encourage buying, the platform requires that users hold at least 5 million tokens of CATE to be able to earn by creating memes. that may be a large number, but at a price of $0.000001468/token as of February 22, it works about to around $7.34. it is interesting to note that this isn’t the first time that CATE has received viral interest. it was pretty popular last October, and hit a peak price of around $0.00001159/token, which is around 8x its current price.

at their core, meme coins are more speculative bets than good investments. while some have delivered 100x or 1000x returns for early investors, a lot of others have also gone down to zero. if one wishes to invest in CATE, it is perhaps wise to allocate only a small portion of their budget to it.