Moe Levin Speaks at WAGMI: Bitcoin's $100K Growth, Meme Coin Experiments, and Trump’s Token Play

WAGMI and Bitcoin’s Potential: Moe Levin on Blockchain Evolution and Industry Validation

Moe Levin, a distinguished entrepreneur, blockchain innovator, and the visionary behind the events firm Keynote and the WAGMI conference, has garnered recognition for his significant contributions to the cryptocurrency and blockchain sectors. In addition to his industry achievements, Levin has provided guidance to governments, regulatory bodies, financial institutions, and startups on bitcoin and integrating blockchain technology.

On Wednesday afternoon, I had the opportunity to sit down with Levin at the James L. Knight Center, where he shared his thoughts on bitcoin and various themes tied to the event.

Bitcoin.com News (BCN): What is your perspective on bitcoin exceeding the $100,000 mark?

Moe Levin (ML): I think it was an inevitability. It sounds like a really big number, 100,000 sounds like a big number, but it’s about one and a half or 1.8 times from the last all-time high. That’s not a huge increase for something that has so much potential. Like this isn’t 100 times, this is a pretty stable rise to $100,000, which is natural and inevitable.

With the number of people in the community and the amount of businesses growing and building on blockchain and crypto, the price isn’t reflective of how important the industry is, and $100,000 seems underpriced or mispriced. So yeah, it’s not that impressive … It’s it’s good and it’s some sort of validation, but it isn’t all that impressive. It’s good and it’s some sort of validation, but it isn’t all that impressive.

BCN: So do you think $1 million per bitcoin is inevitable?

ML: I’m not sure, because there’s so many different coins out there. There’s so many different options that have different value propositions. Bitcoin remains the highest in terms of price and market cap, also as a function of having 21 million coins as the supply. There’s a lot of really great projects. The Ethereum project and foundation and people building on Ethereum are very big. I don’t know the numbers of it, but it’s been said that Solana has potentially more volume traffic builders. The Sui Foundation is also quite large, and impressively building.

So different productions have different values and some of those things might suck up the sort of million-dollar target potential of bitcoin, just because there’s other options.

BCN: WAGMI has its own meme coin. What insights can you share with our readers about it?

ML: Yeah, you know, we had been planning on making a Solana conference about a year ago, and so we produced all these assets and we wanted to make a meme coin around it as well. And Solana makes their own events called Breakpoint, which are quite good, actually. So we never did it, we never launched it, and also the market wasn’t that big with meme coins, but then over the last week or so, Trump launched a coin, and Melania started a coin. So, I just said, you know what, we have all these assets, let me launch it on Pump.fun, and just see what happens as an experiment to reward people that are part of the community, engage and give them activations cause they at conferences.

We have a lot of different partners, you know, thousands of partners over the years, hundreds of thousands of past attendees. We have a way to leverage this network and use a coin as a sort of internal motivation or reward system. Some things we just don’t know yet. Then surprisingly, within six hours, there was $150 million in volume and a $40 million market cap. Which has now gone down dramatically as well.

It’s the first sort of conference meme token in the world, and all those different activations can happen using it, which isn’t possible without something like that. Now we have a community of engaged users that we can activate and airdrop tokens or sponsors or partners that want to do something with the community.

BCN: What do you believe attendees of WAGMI can look forward to at this year’s conference?

ML: So, what’s interesting about this event, is that we have we’ve been doing this for 12 years now. Depending on the year, we either have a lot of tourists or we have a lot of free tickets to give away, and you see that with a lot of other events. There’s a lot of, you know, people that are more noise than signal. What we’ve always tried to do is have the most signal and the most value for attendees, so this event is basically all signal.

Attendees can expect to meet great people, and witness some of the best speakers in the world, and every event moves the industry forward by six months because of the connections and collaborations that are made from these events. So they should be expecting fantastic content, amazing nightlife and after-parties. The whole Miami Blockchain Week is fantastic.

BCN: What do you think about Donald Trump pardoning Ross Ulbricht?

ML: Ross’s mom Lyn has spoken at maybe five of our past ten events, and we’ve been a huge supporter financially and from the conference perspective. So you get goosebumps to hear that he’s finally free. I reached out to Lynn about a month ago, and I’m like, listen, the rumor is he’s gonna be free. We’re doing an event three days after the inauguration. He’s welcome. We’ll keep a space on the agenda if he wants to speak there. And she was said thank you so much but it might be a little bit soon.

I think what’s really important for him is to be back with his family and to just be together and try to recover and re-rehabilitate after such a long time. You know, ten years is not a short period of time, and the whole world has changed since then. That’s gonna take a while to rebuild and recover after such a traumatic experience… So we couldn’t be happier and selfishly wanted to speak at the event, just to share the story, but, you know, he’s not the only one. Roger Ver is dealing with a whole lot of problems.

You know, the weird thing about the American system is you know, you have these states where people are still in prison for marijuana charges that have now been legalized, like where marijuana is legal, but they’re still in prison for the things that they did that was supposed to be illegal. And, you know, there might be people that are being charged with launching a Pump.fun token… But now Trump is launching one, you know?

BCN: How do you envision bitcoin’s trajectory in 2025?

ML: Bitcoin specifically has been the subject of much more experimentation in the last couple of years. Some ideas are really cool. Whether it’s rollups on one, Rune and Ordinals, AI frameworks using Bitcoin, or some parallelization, it’s likely been the most innovative year for Bitcoin since Bitcoin. And the net result of that is more cool things will be built and seen. I’m not sure what those things are, but I’m sure they’re going to be exciting because people are experimenting. Once you have scientists, engineers, or developers building something, the future is exciting.

Bitcoin luckily still has a very active community. It’s great to see the velocity of new projects and new ways of thinking about Bitcoin and what develops from that. That’s cool.

BCN: What is your opinion on those who claim Trump will usher in a new “golden age”?

ML: I think people overestimate Trump. There hasn’t been a case where one politician has revolutionized an entire industry. Back in 2014 or 2015, “The Big Bang Theory” had an episode where they mentioned Bitcoin. Across every forum and online platform, people were like, ‘Oh my God, there’s validation here. Bitcoin is validated; it’s been on TV.’ A couple of years later, some people had a meeting in Congress, and the Federal Reserve was talking about Bitcoin. Then it was like, ‘Okay, we got further validation.’

I think we’re at a point where validation is bulls***. The whole concept of this event, WAGMI, is like a rejection of begging for validation. We’re gonna make it. You don’t need to worry about that stuff. It will come; we are here. It’s a rallying cry for an industry saying, ‘You know what, we’re here. We’re building something amazing.’ It’s easy to feel self-conscious or doubtful about what you’re doing, but you don’t need to do that anymore.

The industry spans the entire globe, with the smartest people in the world working and building on it, with the nicest and most inclusive community ever. And while the industry is sometimes fragmented, there are still many, many different communities that are welcoming. There are crypto meetups all the time. The industry is huge and better than ever.

So, Trump is a nice little validation and pat on the back. Hopefully, American regulation and the ability to create a company here will be made easier, but it’s not like people were waiting for him to open up a business. The industry has been evolving and will continue to evolve no matter who’s in charge, and long after he’s gone.