Think of a Wall Street trader and you probably imagine a master of the universe. A young man in a sharp suit and slicked-back hair, earning giant sums of money guessing stock movements and barking buy and sell orders into a phone.
What you don’t usually imagine is a monkey licking a screen.
But maybe you should.
Because it now seems that monkeys picking stocks by licking the icons they like best can trade stocks more profitably than professional traders.
Or at least Finkey can.
Finkey lives at the Center For Rehabilitation Of Wildlife in South Africa, the country’s oldest organization dedicated to the rehabilitation and conservation of orphaned and injured wildlife. He’s sponsored by a group of crypto enthusiasts who call themselves “degens with a dream.”
The enthusiasts created a memecoin called $Finkey, placed a livestream camera in the monkey cage, replaced that camera with a new one after the monkeys destroyed it, and added a laptop and wifi cables.
For two hours every day, the laptop screen shows floating meme coins submitted by members of the crypto community. When a monkey clicks a bubble—or licks it—he places a trade in the market and gets a reward. If the trade closes with a profit, the community gets a share and the money is used to buy and burn $Finkey.
The better Finkey trades, the higher the value of the coin.
The project’s organizers say that their aim is simple: to produce newspaper headlines declaring that a monkey has beaten Wall Street. After the first two weeks of trading, Finkey was already outperforming Blackrock.
But Finkey is doing more than licking screens and mocking self-important, overpaid traders. The project’s sponsorship is helping the center to renovate its cages, the last stage of rehabilitation before the troop is released into the world.
It’s also creating a new generation of memecoins. As cryptocurrency’s joke has worn thin, memecoins need more than a funny name and a cartoon icon if they’re going to attract an audience’s attention.
Showing up institutional investors is giving an old joke a new punchline.
And it’s also allowing members of the crypto community to boast that their master of the universe is a monkey with a taste for coins.
Joel Comm is a Columnist at Grit Daily. He is a New York Times bestselling author, blockchain enthusiast, professional keynote speaker, social media marketing strategist, live video expert, technologist, brand influencer, futurist and eternal 12-year old. With over two decades of experience harnessing the power of the web, publishing, social media and mobile applications to expand reach and engage in active relationship marketing, Joel is a sought-after public speaker who leaves his audiences inspired, entertained, and armed with strategic tools to create highly effective new media campaigns. His latest project is as co-host of The Bad Crypto Podcast, a top cryptocurrency show making the future of digital payments easy to understand.
