The meme coin boom is cooling off, and some of the most active crypto traders are shifting their usual tactics to stocks of companies in the artificial intelligence and chip sectors. Instead of tokens that grew out of jokes, internet memes, and online cults, they are seeking new momentum in shares of NVIDIA, Micron Technology, SK hynix, Sandisk Corporation, and other players in the semiconductor market.
- Raul Patel, founder of a crypto company, has moved from actively trading meme coins to betting on companies related to AI.
- Demand is rapidly growing on crypto exchanges for contracts tied to shares of chip and AI infrastructure makers.
- This market has already attracted hedge funds, but analysts warn: speculative surges can end with a sharp drop.
Why Meme Coins Have Given Way to AI Stocks
Two years ago, Raul Patel barely slept at night. He traded his own crypto assets and constantly watched the wave of meme coins named after viral animals, jokes, and social media characters. In these stories, everything was decided by speed and timing: if you missed a few hours, you could wake up after the crowd had already exited the trade.
Simply put, a meme coin is a cryptocurrency that most often grows out of a joke, image, character, or internet meme. Unlike Bitcoin, Ethereum, or infrastructure tokens, these coins usually do not have a strong practical use case: their value is more based on community attention, virality, and people’s willingness to buy into the story. The most recognizable examples are Dogecoin, Shiba Inu, and Pepe; new tokens related to crypto culture, social media, and famous personalities are constantly appearing alongside them.
Price, Buying, and Risks of Meme Coins
The price of a single meme coin can be fractions of a cent or much higher: the number itself is not as important as capitalization, liquidity, and how many people are willing to trade the token. The price is influenced by hype, news, influencer posts, community activity, trading volume, listings on major crypto exchanges, and the market’s overall risk appetite. You can usually buy or exchange these coins on a crypto exchange: create an account, fund your balance, choose a trading pair, and exchange money or another cryptocurrency for the desired token.
People try to profit from meme coins through short-term trading, holding tokens, participating in communities, or launching their own project. Technically, you can create a meme coin on Ethereum, Solana, or another blockchain, but you need either smart contract skills or special platforms for token issuance. The main risk is that growth often does not rely on fundamental value: volatility, manipulation, weak liquidity, and sharp sell-offs can quickly lead to losses.
When people talk about more promising meme coins, they usually look not only at the name but also at the size and activity of the community, liquidity, listings, meme recognition, and the token’s ability to hold attention. That’s why large and prominent stories like Dogecoin, Shiba Inu, or Pepe are discussed more often, but even they remain highly risky.
Now, Patel says he sleeps much more peacefully. From his home in Tampa, the 36-year-old trader manages a portfolio that barely resembles the set of assets from the meme coin craze. Tokens born from jokes and viral trends have given way to shares of companies at the center of the AI boom.
“It’s much nicer this way. You can sleep peacefully and not think about your «bags»,” says Raul Patel, using crypto slang for positions in a portfolio.
According to him, the approach remains familiar: get in before most, catch the momentum, find a catalyst before the market notices. But the assets are different. AI-related companies have revenue, production plans, and events to check the investment idea against. Meme coins often offered nothing but crowd sentiment.
Crypto Exchanges Open the Door to Wall Street
The migration is visible not only in individual traders’ portfolios. It’s also noticeable on exchanges, where the crypto audience has received familiar tools for betting on stocks. According to tracker data, in just one week, contracts on shares of SK hynix Inc., Micron Technology Inc., and SanDisk Corp. attracted over $8 billion to Hyperliquid.
On Binance, the average daily turnover for contracts tied to stocks rose from $85 million in February to $5.5 billion in July. Just six months ago, this market barely existed, but now it’s large enough to attract professionals. Hedge funds from Hong Kong to New York are taking the other side of trades and earning commissions that retail traders pay to maintain positions.
Cryptocurrency has accustomed participants to a market with no closing hours, high speed, and leverage. Now, this model is being applied to Wall Street’s favorite stocks. Crypto traders bring their own infrastructure: anonymous X (social network) accounts, trading communities, round-the-clock access, and a willingness to hype an idea as long as it gets attention.
The mechanics resemble the old meme coin cycle. A viral account talks about a little-known company, followers start buying, and the price rise itself becomes an argument for further purchases. That’s how tokens used to soar, and now similar dynamics are appearing in shares of companies related to AI, memory, and optical systems.
Patel, for example, started buying shares of Swedish Sivers Semiconductors AB, which trades on Nasdaq Stockholm, after posts by the anonymous account Serenity on X. Serenity has more than 970,000 followers, and Patel believes this author knows how to find little-known AI stories before they become mainstream topics.
“In addition to fundamentals, I bought a few stocks he highlighted. Around certain companies, including Sivers Semiconductors, he created almost an aura and a cult,” explains Raul Patel.
He compares Serenity to Murad, one of the prominent figures of the meme coin boom. Murad promoted the idea of a “meme coin supercycle”: according to this logic, the strongest tokens were less financial assets and more internet cults. Such stories easily bring to mind Dogecoin, Doge, Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and even the Department of Government Efficiency as part of a broad meme policy and online agenda, where a social network can quickly turn a joke into a market factor.
Bets Have Gotten Bigger, and Risks Are Tougher
The surge of interest in AI company stocks came at a difficult time. Chipmaker shares have gone through their worst period in over a year: momentum trading has weakened, and memory-related stocks have been among the biggest losers. SK hynix lost a double-digit percentage in a single session, and such moves are familiar to any crypto trader.
Sivers Semiconductors AB, one of Patel’s positions, fell nearly 70% from its peak. But the trader himself says he bought it not for hours, but for years. For the meme coin market, such a horizon seems almost like an eternity: there, long holding periods sometimes lasted just a few days.
Not all market participants see the new wave as healthy. Jukan Choe, an analyst at Citrini Research, sees a dangerous structure too heavily dependent on retail demand and liquidity.
“I consider this a very unhealthy type of trading. Such stock growth is not based on fundamentals. It’s a liquidity tower built by retail investors, and over time it will almost certainly collapse quickly,” says Jukan Choe.
Exchanges are actively seeking a compromise between the crypto market and traditional finance. Crypto platforms are increasingly offering contracts on stocks, ETFs, and commodities. Classic operators, including CME Group and Cboe Global Markets, are expanding crypto products because investors want longer trading sessions and, in the future, 24/7 access. The line between the crypto market and Wall Street is becoming increasingly blurred.
On Hyperliquid, traders can open long and short positions with up to 20x leverage. The list of instruments includes not only Nvidia Corp. but also companies in the memory and optical technology segments. Shunyet Zhang, head of exchange trading at Binance, calls the growth of perpetual futures on stocks and commodities on his platform unprecedented.
Perpetual futures differ from regular ones in that they have no expiration date. With them, a trader can follow Nvidia’s stock dynamics without buying the shares themselves. It’s the same type of instrument that was previously widely used for bitcoin and Ethereum.
Most trading in such contracts is now tied to bullish bets. Perpetual contracts use regular funding payments to help keep the price close to the underlying asset. When too many want to open long positions, longs usually pay shorts, and the funding rate can spike sharply.
This is where professional players make money. In the basic version, the strategy is simple: buy the shares, sell the perpetual contract, and collect funding payments while the imbalance persists. South Korean Hyperithm uses this model thanks to ties with local brokers and access to shares of companies like SK hynix.
“We believe retail demand creates these gaps. Institutionalization narrows some of them, but as long as the market remains fragmented and divided, structural inefficiency will persist,” says Sangrok Oh, CEO and founder of Hyperithm.
But leverage works both ways. When too many participants are in the same position, even a small move against them can trigger a chain of sales. Then the mechanism that drove the price up starts working in the opposite direction.
The recent sell-off in AI company stocks has not yet knocked Patel out of his strategy. He plans to hold many positions for a year or two. For a former active meme coin player, that’s a very long time, but that’s how he now separates investments from the short-term hype chase.
“You always want to get out before the real sell-off on the news begins,” says Raul Patel.
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