The Floki DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) that manages the Floki (FLOKI) memecoin, unanimously voted to use a portion of the 16.3 billion Floki tokens from its community buyback wallet as liquidity for the upcoming Floki exchange-traded product (ETP).

Set to go live in the first quarter of 2025, the Floki ETP will give traditional finance investors in the European market exposure to the memecoin — currently ranked as the 66th-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization on CoinMarketCap.

Following the passage of the community proposal, a spokesperson for Floki said the ETP listing would add legitimacy to the community-driven memecoin:

"The Floki ETP will be going live on the SIX Swiss Exchange, which is the largest stock exchange in Switzerland, and the third largest stock exchange in Europe, in an almost unprecedented move for memecoin legitimacy.”

According to CoinGecko, Memecoins were the second best-performing crypto narrative of 2024. The sector returned an average of roughly 2185% to investors during the year — second only to artificial intelligence, which returned an average of approximately 2939%.

Related: Floki, Mastercard launch 13-crypto debit card in Europe

2024: the year of the memecoin

Another CoinGecko study found that memecoins held the biggest mindshare among crypto investors in 2024 — commanding approximately 31% of total investor interest.

In October 2024, Google search interest for memecoins overtook search interest for Bitcoin (BTC). Memecoins recorded a search interest of 77 out of 100 for the month, compared to Bitcoin’s 33.

Revenue for decentralized applications on Solana reached $365 million in November 2024 and was driven primarily by Pump.fun — a platform for launching memecoins.

Data from the research platform Syndica revealed the memecoin launchpad became the first Solana-based application to surpass $100 million in monthly revenue.

However, memecoins have also created a sharp divide within the crypto industry, with some calling for a return to utility over pure market speculation.

Former Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao told followers in a November 2024 X post: “I am not against memes, but meme coins are getting ’a little’ weird now. Let’s build real applications using blockchain."

Magazine: 5 real use cases for useless memecoins