When Kaden Lopez, 18, was arrested for throwing a bright green dildo into the crowd at a WNBA game in Phoenix earlier this month, he told officers that he was sorry that the sex toy had struck a man and his nine-year-old niece. “It was just a stupid prank that was trending on social media,” he explained.
True enough: Lopez is one of several individuals who have thrown green dildos at WNBA courts this summer, and the second to be arrested, after 23-year-old Delbert Carver allegedly carried out a similar stunt in Atlanta in July. (Both men were booked on disorderly conduct and indecency charges, though it’s not clear whether Lopez will be prosecuted, and Carver has yet to enter a plea.) Coaches, fans, and players have decried the practice as misogynist and dangerous, with multiple games paused after a neon phallus hit the floor. But Lopez seemed unaware that the dildo-tossing is more than just a vulgar, trollish meme. It’s also the physical manifestation of a memecoin, a cryptocurrency token of no underlying value that can be pumped by online communities that band together to create viral momentum for the asset. In this case, it was Green Dildo Coin, which started trading on July 28, the day before the first WNBA incident involving such a sex toy. The price, which can be tracked even in reputable financial outlets including Forbes, spiked the day after Lopez threw his at the Phoenix Mercury game.
Indeed, a crypto group told ESPN that it began orchestrating the dildo launches in order to generate enthusiasm and social media chatter that would drive investment in the coin. That they have claimed no connection with Lopez, and deny that Carver was part of their operation, speaks to the way that an internet concept can be mimicked and perpetuated by those who may lack any understanding of its origins. Not only did an uncertain number of Green Dildo Coin investors reap a windfall from the WNBA disruptions, but others — some no doubt with insider knowledge — placed and won bets on prediction sites such as Polymarket about when another game would be interrupted by a dildo, as well as what color it would be. In a Telegram chat centered around the token, Lopez was hailed as a “legend” and a “hero” for driving up the price of the coin, possibly without realizing his actions would have this effect. (It was since fallen again, though it has a total market capitalization of around $9 million.)
Crypto has always traded on the dynamics of digital spaces, but memecoins, inherently more volatile and gimmicky than something like Bitcoin, are uniquely tied to the vicissitudes of online culture. The oldest and most popular memecoin, Dogecoin, has a market cap of approximately $32 billion, while top-ranked imitators including Shiba Inu coin and Bonk coin represent billions in their own right. Meme currencies have surged in recent years, reaching a total market cap of as much as $140 billion in December 2024 while accounting for more than 11 percent of the “altcoin” market (that is, the total volume of crypto coin value excluding the standard tokens Bitcoin and Ether).
There are several factors potentially at play here, not least of which could be the crypto-friendly Trump administration’s relaxing of fraud enforcement in the industry. The Trumps, of course, launched their own memecoins, $TRUMP and $MELANIA, around the inauguration in January, part of a series of crypto plays that have reportedly netted the first family more than $2 billion to date. With their strong links to this side of the blockchain economy, it’s little surprise that Donald Trump Jr. was among the group effectively plugging Green Dildo Coin, in his case by reposting a meme of his father dropping a dildo onto a WNBA court from the roof of the White House.
It makes perfect sense that memecoins, with their aggressively promotional backers and opportunities for brazen grifting, would boom during a second Trump term. But it has also never been easier to instantaneously create and start trading a coin based on any person, event. Dogecoin, for comparison, was introduced in 2013 by software engineers lampooning what seemed like outlandish Bitcoin speculation at the time. Today, anyone can easily kickstart their own with the platform Pump.Fun (the very name alludes to the art of hyping a novelty token to raise its value). The site debuted in January 2024 and became one of the fastest-growing crypto apps in history as it lowered the bar for memecoin hijinx.
As a direct consequence, it is facing multiple class-action lawsuits alleging that it incites deceptive schemes that have cost investors billions, and yet the obvious risks that come with buying functionally worthless memecoins have done nothing to diminish their popularity. One Pump.Fun suit, for example, cites the collapse of PNUT, a coin referencing an Instagram-famous pet squirrel who became a fixation of right-wing commentators in the closing days of the 2024 election after he was euthanized by the state of New York — perhaps the most unpromising, flash-in-the-pan asset available to crypto traders at the time. Another cash-grab meme token, named $HAWK after “Hawk Tuah Girl” Haliey Welch, who rose to influencer fame because of an impromptu street interview in which she described a fellatio technique in graphic terms, cratered within hours of its launch in December, leading to an FBI investigation and an ongoing legal action against the promoters. Nonetheless, the memecoin saw a brief spike in March when the Securities and Exchange Commission closed its probe into the matter without filing charges against Welch herself.
It’s almost as if, without anything to tether these cryptocurrencies to conventional market forces, their fluctuations indicate nothing more than cycles of mania and panic. On some level, that’s the entire point: you can embrace the trollish nihilism of staking your fortune on the movements of “Fartcoin” and “Useless Coin,” flaunt your shitposting ideology with stakes in “PEPE” or the “Gigachad” token, or convince yourself that a famous picture of a crow holding a knife in its beak is a suitable basis for manufacturing money out of thin air (the coin is called $CAW, if you’re wondering). Is it rising inequality and desperation that has driven so many into these dead ends of capitalism? An inclination to laugh all the way to the poorhouse? The thrill of a frenzy and the sense of belonging that came with bull runs on “meme stocks” of failing businesses such as GameStop?
Maybe it’s all of the above — along with the mistaken impression that in an ecosystem rife with scams, it can’t be all that hard to get rich quick and leave someone else holding the bag. Whereas the Bitcoin boosters lecture passionately on the benefits of a decentralized financial system, taking up the mantle of an important grassroots movement, the memecoin speculators subscribe to a zero-sum logic of winners and suckers, mostly looking to outwit one another. Nearly two decades after cryptocurrencies were invented, these tokens reveal a lowest common denominator of wealth-seeking behaviors: meaningless attention.
In the end, that’s why you have teenagers chucking dildos at WNBA players without quite knowing what motivated them to do so. What they can tell you is that it had been done before, and caused a response, and could be done again without much effort. Likewise, a meme is a replicable, repeatable idea that need not have anything else to it, just as memecoins have no claim to equate themselves with money. At best, they lay bare the contradictions, abstractions, and perverse incentives of the global economy itself. Alas, it appears that many see them less as cautionary examples than a new frontier for greed.