Degens: Down and Out in the Crypto Casino is a feature-length documentary in the making.

The film explores the inner world of one of the most fascinating and overlooked counter-cultural movements of our time. A world inhabited by Degens, short for degenerates, who invest their meager income into memecoins.

Memecoins, and the communities that rally behind them, are a unique subculture within the cryptocurrency sector.

They are Generation Z’s answer to feeling powerless as the cost of living squeeze tightens, and the baby boomers take all the wealth and pull the ladder up behind them.

The documentary discovers how the collective power of these memecoin communities can achieve impressive results, such as funding a Nigerian presidential candidate, and even launching a memecoin into space. The film chronicles unique degen characters and events leading up to, surrounding, and during the Shitcoin 2024 memecoin conference.

Degens documentary narrators

Gordon Grant, a cryptocurrency derivatives trader and the Head of Trading at Genesis, offers a lucid and insightful perspective on the origins of the memecoin phenomenon, stemming from the heart of the global financial machine in Wall Street, New York.

World renown economist Richard D Wolff. The New York Times Magazine has named Richard “America’s most prominent Marxist economist”. As a narrator in the Degens documentary, he describes the memecoin phenomenon as a symptom of late-stage capitalism, alienation, and the crisis of loneliness.

Founder of the anarcho-primitivist movement John Zerzan. John gives his analysis of the memecoin community phenomenon from an anarcho-primitivist perspective.

Degens documentary subjects

PizzaT is the leader of the Phr!endz memecoin community, and informed us that he is the former leader of various memecoin communities, such as hpos10i, McDonald’s coin, Amber Heard Inu, and Dogeconnect. He now claims to be the self nominated leader of the Dogebonk memecoin community. His creativity forms the foundation for many of the recent anarchic styles emerging from the farthest corners of the memecoin ecosystem. PizzaT documents his life on the fringes. He lives in Californian, has a full-time job, but due to the current economic turmoil, he finds himself effectively homeless, residing in a van parked in a McDonald’s parking lot. This setting serves as a microcosm reflecting the economic challenges of our times, and many individuals like PizzaT see memecoins as their path to escape the poverty trap.

Lyd is the founder of the CumRocket memecoin token and community. She founded crypto’s answer to OnlyFans, based around a memecoin called ‘Cummies’. The project skyrocketed after Elon Musk took notice and tweeted about it. Lyd’s memecoin community grew throughout the crypto bull-run, and many degens achieved substantial wealth as a result of her dedication and effort. However, as soon as the bear market hit, the memecoin’s price plummeted as people quickly cashed out to take profits. Lyd held on to her memecoins, staying true to the project she founded. For one brief moment she was an unrealised millionaire.

Memecoins communities

With slim hope of getting a foot on the property ladder and thoughts of having to work into their 80s, the global financial system has failed Generation Z. So, they’ve gone and created their own economy, based on memecoins, which are a frivolous salad of smiling cartoon-faced cryptocurrencies.

Well-known memecoins include the likes of Dogecoin and Shiba Inu. There are also more unique varieties like Dogebonk and the uniquely named Harry Potter Obama Sonic 10 Inu.

Memecoins all differ in character, tone, and theme. However, they all have one thing in common; people have made profits of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Nothing in the broader world of finance and trading can rally as fast as a memecoin. Frequently these tokens can increase in price by thousands of times over, in the space of a few weeks.

However, the flip side of the coin is that the harder they go up, the harder they fall. The Generation Z throng that have flocked to these monetary mechanisms in the hope of making life-changing wealth, usually lose all of what they invested. And some have invested much, much more than they could ever have afforded to lose. Creating life-changing debt, instead of life-changing wealth.

Welcome to the crypto casino, and the degens that live here.