My realistic price prediction for Toshi is zero
Here is my realistic price prediction for Toshi: it is going to zero. Seriously. Brian Armstrong's cat is now a 300-and-some-million-dollar market cap, and in my view this has no hope of having any future utility. I think the odds are that it has already peaked right up here, sitting somewhere around 30-some percent higher, almost double actually, where it was before, and it just got listed on Coinbase. If I had any of it, I would absolutely sell it, because this is just a game of musical chairs. Whoever is the last one holding this before it goes to zero loses everything.
If you go to the official website, the whole goal of it is trying to be the face of Base. So you are betting on a meme. And that is very much what this is: gambling. You are betting that Toshi can hold the place of top meme coin on Coinbase's Ethereum layer 2, named after Brian Armstrong's cat. There are just so many huge issues with this.
Meme coins do not last
First, there are always people creating new meme coins on Base all the time. Meme coins generally do not last the test of time, on Base or anywhere else, and in my experience you are going to lose money on them. You also distract yourself and make yourself nervous, and for what? Look at Brett. Brett got to be the top meme coin on Base, and then it just dumped from 20 cents a couple of months ago down to 5 cents. Everybody got ripped off on that. As soon as Toshi went up, people started saying, well, I guess Brett is not the top coin anymore. I said Brett sucked and was a terrible investment, because you cannot treat these as real investments. They are not. These are meme coins, and a layer 2 meme coin on Base is, in my opinion, absolutely unsustainable for the long term.
You are betting on an exchange like Coinbase to pump your coin. You are betting on people to just FOMO into this without doing any research, without thinking at all about what the real-world utility of this is. Toshi says it wants to be the face of Base and a leading figure in the ecosystem, with a robust meme culture and an expanding community, striving to be the premier meme coin. So it is trying to be the best of the garbage coins on Base.
Why meme coins are the worst thing I have seen in crypto
As I wrote on X earlier, meme coins are the worst thing I have ever seen in crypto, because you are taking money that could be put into real innovation and used to improve the quality of life on earth, but instead you are dumping it into stuff like Toshi. You are basically taking the resources you have worked hard for, and I work hard for mine, and just throwing them away, hoping other people are foolish enough to do the same thing.
To me this is already topped out by being newly listed on Coinbase. It is on a bunch of these other exchanges already. So to me it does not have a lot more upside left in it, and most coins only get this one peak and that is it. The big peak for this was finally getting listed on Coinbase, and I can see why people got hyped up about it. But somebody asked me specifically about this who was holding a lot of it and had been waiting a long time for it to pump. My honest take is that now is exit time, because from here on out it is just another one of the many, many meme coins on Base. If you are going to make money on meme coins, you have to get them way back here or down at the bottom, and even then it is junky.
Meme coins waste your time. They are extremely dangerous. I have seen so many meme coins just on ICP go to zero recently. Over the long term, meme coins almost never last. And if you were not the first one in, and most of the time you are not the first one in, you are on some crappy project that is going to zero. There are so many cat and dog meme coins already. A decade ago there were not, but now the landscape in crypto is littered with cat meme coins and dog meme coins. It is hard to even stand out these days.
The numbers behind the hype
The website certainly looks decent, and the account has 100,000 followers. But at this point the engagement is poor. Look at an account with 100,000 followers and only a few thousand interactions. Some of these posts do better, and this one is decent, so they may not be using bots as hard as some of the other ones. But at the same time, how sustainable is putting out pictures of a cat? Does that last into the future? At what point does this disappear? At what point do people forget about it and it becomes irrelevant?
To me it is on the way down right now, because if you are actually doing your research in crypto, the only reasonable thing to do is invest in stuff that you use every single day. What in God's name are you going to do with Toshi's cat meme coin? What happens if Toshi the cat dies? It might actually pump when he dies, but then it is going to zero right after that. Brian Armstrong is going to get another cat someday, and that cat's next meme coin will probably knock this one off. What if he gets a dog? What if he just gets five more cats and people make meme coins off of all of them?
We can do better than this
Come on. We have to do more to make a better world, unless you want to just sit in this junk we have today. Let's do better than investing in Brian Armstrong's cat meme coin. I think we can do better than that. This is extremely risky, and in my experience this kind of thing goes to zero 99% of the time, or it stays flat against something like Bitcoin and trends down. You are almost never going to win. If you feel like you missed it, you should not have been in it anyway. You should not have been buying Brian Armstrong's cat meme coin to start with, hoping that other people would buy it after you and pump the price.
To me, everybody in meme coins like this is a sucker, and insiders who see how it works can easily rip off tons of people all the time across all kinds of coins. The insiders are laughing at the masses who keep getting tricked into stuff like this over and over again. So my belief is that Toshi has topped out. I would dump everything I had today and be thankful for that dirty, nasty meme coin money.
Honestly, the anxiety you feel investing in a meme coin is well deserved. You know you are in something nasty, dirty, and not going to last very long, and you know you are doing something bad. So my advice, from my own experience, is to stop, learn the fundamentals so you are not easily tricked into buying crap like this, and put your resources into real projects instead. If you want to keep learning how I think about all of this, you can dig into my Money playlist and build a foundation in real crypto investing.