“I don’t think it’s here to stay,” said Dave Portnoy, referring to coin memes – both of the crypto corners he often poured fuel through his social media antics.
Speaking at the stage at Consensus 2025 with Tom Farley, CEO of Crypto Exchange Bullish, the founder of Barstool Sports peeked behind the layers of his short, chaotic stint in the meme coin world. In his usual brash candor, Portnoy described a journey of sudden windfalls, legal landmines, and the kind of public backlash that can be made even with the most stubborn internet provocateur thinks twice.
“I like to have a rush, I’m a heartbreaking gambler,” he admitted. “But then the wise side to me is like, is it worth hate?” The conversation is part of a broader discussion about crypto speculation and hype culture, where coin memes-the tokens create more for jokes than utility-get the imagination of hungry entrepreneurs. Portnoy, who built a barstool in a media empire on viral content and sports gambling, found himself infiltrating the same digital fever.
It started with the safemoon, one of the earliest viral tokens of the covid -ra crypto boom. Portnoy saw social media posts about entrepreneurs doing “9,000,000,000%” acquired, purchased, produced a video that scoffed at a lack of real value – and still charged.
“They usually said that Safemoon paid me to advance them. Total lies. I would spend $ 20k to get out of the lawsuit.” he said.
Unexpectedly, he pushed. Inspired by the idea of launching a Barstool coin and skipping the busy going public, Portnoy began to research how the coin meme was made. That led him to a developer who built a token called Libra, which is said to be supported by the President of Argentina.
Portnoy bought $ 4.5 million worth.
“I’m at SNL with Lady Gaga. I’m just typing. I’m like, what’s going on here?” he said. Developer Elon Musk told him to tweet about it. Instead, the President removed any involvement. “I lost all my money.”
Portnoy said he got lucky – the developer eventually paid him in full, even though he wasn’t sure why. “I’m one of the lucky ones, but you know, I won’t get back that money.”
Despite the losses, Portnoy maintained dabbling. He launched coins called greed and greed 2leaning against satire. Another coin, Jailstool, emerged from public resentment to his experiments on the coin meme. Someone else created the token, but Portnoy embraced the name and posted about it. At one point, he claimed, a $ 1,000 investment wolf at $ 7 million – within an hour.
“It took me 13 years to make that kind of money in Barstool,” he said.
But what climbs almost always crashed back. Portnoy said he lost a track of how many times he was accused of “rug pulls,” a term for when the insider threw a coin and left lateComers with worthless tokens.
He described the meme coins as a rigged game, led by a major group of early buyers with trade bots and algorithms who know when to come out. “It’s the same group of winners and it’s the same group of losers.”
That realization seemed to change his appetite. As he teased the possible launch of Greed 3, he admitted that the backlash was more difficult in the stomach in real life. Someone confronted him at a Las Vegas casino, allegedly losing $ 200,000. “It’s all fun and games behind the computer but strengthened people are missing and making real money, and they’re not always responsible for risk, even if I think it should.”
Despite the money and memes, he said the scene of the meme coin was eventually uncontrollable.
“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 does not claim to have answers. But if he is a weathervane for which meme coin mania meme can head, the forecast looks rough. “I can’t imagine being here to stay. I think here to stay in the next four years. What happens after that? I don’t know.”
