MoonPay President: Memecoins’ Real Value Lies in Tokenizing Attention

Keith A. Grossman, president of the prominent payment infrastructure company MoonPay, positions memecoins not as a cultural fad but as a significant technological experiment. The central thesis, as outlined in his analysis, is that blockchain technology provides a novel mechanism for quantifying and representing a previously intangible asset: human attention. In the digital age, attention is a primary economic driver, fueling the revenue models of social media giants and content platforms. Grossman asserts that memecoins demonstrate how this attention can be “tokenized easily and at low costs,” creating a direct, tradable representation of collective focus and community sentiment.

This process of tokenization, Grossman suggests, is the “real innovation” behind the memecoin phenomenon. It moves the concept beyond speculative gambling to a proof-of-concept for a more accessible attention economy. By leveraging blockchain’s decentralized ledger, the creation and exchange of these attention-based tokens could, in theory, be opened to anyone, bypassing traditional gatekeepers. This aligns with the broader promise of Web3 to redistribute control and ownership from centralized entities to users and participants.

However, Grossman delivers a crucial caveat to this optimistic vision. He identifies a major flaw in the current memecoin model: the failure to circulate value back to the community that generates the attention. “That value did not flow back to participants and mostly remained trapped by large, centralized platforms,” he notes. This creates a stark paradox. While the underlying blockchain technology promises decentralization, the economic benefits have largely been captured by centralized exchanges, early “whale” investors, and social media influencers with outsized reach.

This concentration means the very ecosystem designed to democratize the attention economy often replicates the extractive models of Web2. The vast majority of participants, whose engagement and cultural capital fuel a token’s popularity, bear disproportionate risk while seeing minimal reward. For Grossman, this disconnect between technological potential and economic reality is the key challenge that must be addressed for memecoins to evolve into a sustainable model.

Despite this critique and the current bear market conditions that have dampened enthusiasm, Grossman is clear: “Memecoins are not dead.” He dismisses the notion that their relevance is tied solely to market prices or fleeting narrative hype. Instead, he predicts a resurgence in a “different form.” This evolution will likely involve models that more effectively align incentives, ensuring that value generated from tokenized attention is distributed more equitably among creators, curators, and community members.

The future form of memecoins, as implied by Grossman’s analysis, may integrate more deeply with decentralized social platforms, creator economies, and community-governed projects. The token would act not just as a speculative asset but as a functional key for access, governance, or revenue sharing within a specific digital ecosystem. In this scenario, the “meme” becomes less about a joke and more about a shared cultural identifier for a community that collectively owns and benefits from the economic activity it generates. For payment infrastructure firms like MoonPay, understanding this shift is essential to building the rails for the next phase of digital asset utility, where value truly flows back to the network participants.