“I don’t think it’s here to stay,” Dave Portnoy said, referring to meme coins—the same corner of crypto he’s often poured fuel on through his social media antics.

Speaking on stage at Consensus 2025 with Tom Farley, CEO of crypto exchange Bullish, the Barstool Sports founder peeled back the layers of his short, chaotic stint in the meme coin world. With his usual brash candor, Portnoy described a journey of sudden windfalls, legal landmines, and the kind of public backlash that might make even the most hardened internet provocateur think twice.

“I love the rush, I’m a gambler at heart,” he admitted. “But then the smart part of me is like, is it worth the hate?” The conversation was part of a broader discussion about crypto’s culture of speculation and hype, where meme coins — tokens created more for jokes than utility — have captured the imagination of young, risk-hungry traders. Portnoy, who built Barstool into a media empire on viral content and sports gambling, found himself swept into the same digital fever.

It started with SafeMoon, one of the earliest viral tokens of the COVID-era crypto boom. Portnoy saw social media posts about traders making “9,000,000,000%” gains, bought in, made a video mocking its lack of real value — and got sued anyway.

“They basically said SafeMoon paid me to promote them. Total lie. Cost me $20k to get out of the lawsuit.” he said.

Undeterred, he pushed further. Inspired by the idea of launching a Barstool coin and skipping the hassle of going public, Portnoy began researching how meme coins are made. That led him to a developer who pitched a token called Libra, allegedly backed by the president of Argentina.

Portnoy bought $4.5 million worth.

“I was at SNL with Lady Gaga. I was just typing. I’m like, what the hell is going on here?” he said. The developer had told him Elon Musk would tweet about it. Instead, the president disavowed any involvement. “I lost all my money.”

Portnoy says he got lucky — the developer later reimbursed him in full, though he isn’t sure why. “I’m one of the lucky ones, but you know, I’m not going to not take that money back.”

Despite the losses, Portnoy kept dabbling. He launched coins called Greed and Greed 2, leaning into the satire. Another coin, JailStool, emerged from public outrage at his meme coin experiments. Someone else created the token, but Portnoy embraced the name and posted about it. At one point, he claims, a $1,000 investment ballooned to $7 million — within an hour.

“It took me 13 years to make that kind of money at Barstool,” he said.

But what goes up almost always crashes back down. Portnoy says he’s lost track of how many times he’s been accused of “rug pulls,” a term for when insiders dump a coin and leave latecomers with worthless tokens.

He described meme coins as a rigged game, dominated by a core group of early buyers with trading bots and algorithms who know when to exit. “It’s the same group of winners and it’s the same group of losers.”

That realization seems to have changed his appetite. While he teased the possible launch of Greed 3, he admitted the backlash is harder to stomach in real life. One man confronted him in a Las Vegas casino, claiming he lost $200,000. “It’s all fun and games behind the computer but that reinforces people are losing and making real money, and they’re not always taking responsibility for the risk, even though I think they should.”

Despite the money and the memes, he says the meme coin scene is ultimately unsustainable.

“I get why people like it,” he said. “It’s a form of gambling, it’s a Ponzi scheme, I don’t mean that in a negative way.”

Portnoy doesn’t claim to have the answers. But if he’s a weathervane for where meme coin mania might be heading, the forecast looks grim. “I can’t imagine it’s here to stay. I think it’s here to stay for the next four years. What happens after that? I don’t know.”

The crypto rally took a long-overdue pause on Thursday as traders took some profits following weeks of relentless advance that lifted bitcoin BTC close to record prices.

The consolidation occurred amid a slew of U.S. economic data releases. April retail sales missed expectations, producer prices rose less than forecast, jobless claims stayed on track, while the NY Empire State Manufacturing Index and Philadelphia Fed Manufacturing Survey showed softening business activity—signals that did little to rattle traditional markets. The S&P 500 added 0.4%, while the Nasdaq finished flat.

Bitcoin pulled back to $101,000 early in the U.S. session before rebounding above $103,000 later, modestly down over the past 24 hours.

Altcoins fared worse with the broad-market CoinDesk 20 Index declining 3% during the same period. Native tokens of Aptos APT, Avalanche AVAX and Uniswap UNI tumbled 6%-7%.

Crypto investors shouldn’t sweat today’s pullback, analysts told CoinDesk.

«The current pullback appears to be a correction within a broader medium-term uptrend,» said Ruslan Lienkha, chief of markets at YouHodler.

The upward momentum in equity markets moderated after the China-U.S. tariff delay, and short-term traders began locking in profits, he said. «This shift in sentiment has spilled over into riskier assets, including BTC.»

«Anything below 5% [price move] can often be considered just market noise,» said Kirill Kretov, trading automation expert at CoinPanel. «Some of this movement likely comes from profit-taking, as traders secure gains after the recent rally. With liquidity so thin, even modest sell-offs can quickly translate into noticeable corrections.»

Backing away from short-term movements, the broader price action seems healthy with no clear signs of an imminent top.

Vetle Lunde, senior analyst at K33 Research, said BTC just exited one of its longest periods of below-neutral funding rates, a signal of defensive positioning

«This resembles the risk-averse patterns from October 2023 and 2024 and is far from resembling price action near past local market peaks,» wrote Lunde, who was optimistic that the lack of froth with BTC above $100,000 BTC paves the way for potential fresh record highs.

According to Steno Research, crypto tailwinds stem from a stealth expansion in private credit—especially in the U.S. and Europe. In past bull runs, crypto thrived on base money expansion: massive injections of reserves by central banks that fueled asset inflation across the board. This time, however, the balance sheets of the Fed and European Central Bank have continued shrinking through quantitative tightening.

“Many have pointed to China’s liquidity injections as the primary driver of the rally,” Samuel Shiffman wrote in a Thursday report. “But that misses the mark. The real support is coming from Western bank credit growth—a quieter, less visible engine behind this move.”

He said that forward-looking indicators project global financial conditions improving into the summer months, driven primarily by the U.S. dollar weakening. This has historically lead to higher BTC prices.

«We’ve likely got room through June and into early July before the picture begins to change,» Shiffman said. «But once we approach the back half of July, the setup gets trickier. Our leading indicators suggest that the peak in financial easing might not last past August.»

Banks need to be part of crypto for stablecoins to succeed—that was the message from Jose Fernandez da Ponte, PayPal’s senior vice president of digital currencies, during a panel discussion at Consensus 2025 in Toronto.

«It might sound counterintuitive, but you do want the banks in this space,» Fernandez da Ponte said, adding that their infrastructure—from custody to providing fiat rails—will be essential if stablecoins are to scale beyond crypto-native circles. «You want that connectivity and that fabric to work.»

His remarks came amid efforts to bring regulatory clarity for digital assets in the U.S., with lawmakers inching closer to pass stablecoin legislation that could redefine the market and allow banks to enter the space.

Read more: U.S. Senate’s Stablecoin Push Still Alive as Bill May Return to Floor: Sources

«This is going to be a big unlock,» said Anthony Soohoo, chairman and CEO of MoneyGram, a cross-border money transfer service. «There’s always hesitation: Can I trust this? [The stablecoin legislation] is going to answer a lot of those questions.»

Both executives said they expect a wave of new issuers to enter the market once regulation is in place, followed by a period of consolidation. “It’s not going to be 300 stablecoins, and it’s not going to be just two,” Fernandez da Ponte said.

Currently, Tether’s USDT USDT and Circle’s USDC USDC dominate the market, representing nearly 90% of the $230 billion asset class. PayPal’s PYUSD PYUSD, launched in 2023, lags far behind with $900 million supply. Fernandez da Ponte pushed back on market cap as the primary metric for success. «We look at velocity, active wallets, number of transactions,” he said. “Those are what drive real usage.»

In countries with high inflation and volatile currencies, consumers are seeking out dollar-backed stablecoins as stores of value and tools for cross-border payments. Soohoo said MoneyGram, which operates in over 200 countries with nearly half a million cash-access locations, is helping facilitate that access.

«We see ourselves between physical finance and digital finance,» Soohoo said. «A lot of consumers in local economies want to hold value in dollars but still need to access it as cash to spend in places that don’t take digital currency.»

Stablecoin adoption in developed countries, meanwhile, has been slower. With clear regulation in place, stablecoins can streamline corporate treasury operations and cross-border disbursement, Fernandez da Ponte noted.

«We used to have this mad rush on Friday to make sure money was in the right places before the weekend,» he said. «Now we’re sending money to the Philippines and Africa in ten minutes with stablecoins.»

Both executives noted that real-world use cases, not hype, will determine if stablecoins could reach the trillion-dollar scale in the next years that’s been projected.

«Consumers don’t care about stablecoins. They care about solving problems.» Fernandez da Ponte said. «We’re five years into a ten-year journey, and regulation will define the next half.»