Share this article
Ray Chan: Bridging Web2 and Web3 With Memes
The CEO of Memeland turned memes into cultural currency with 9GAG. Now, he's using crypto to transform them into tools for engagement and community.
Updated Dec 12, 2024, 8:48 p.m. Published Dec 10, 2024, 3:08 p.m.
2024 has been the year of the memecoin supercycle, with demand for the tokens surging to unprecedented heights. Memes are now a $141 billion business, according to CoinGecko, making up around 11% of the entire crypto market (excluding bitcoin and ether).
Memeland CEO Ray Chan has become a prominent figure in the supercycle, leveraging his expertise to blend humor and culture with blockchain, bringing the culture of memes he helped create in Web2 over to Web3.
STORY CONTINUES BELOW
In 2008, during the Web2 era, Chan founded 9GAG, where he curated the best online memes and made them the internet's language of humor and identity.
This profile is part of CoinDesk's Most Influential 2024 package. For all of this year's nominees, click here.
In 2024, Chan spun Memeland out of 9GAG and transformed it into a blueprint for how blockchain, culture and community could reshape the internet via NFTs and GameFi. While those two things aren't anything new in Web3, Memeland has distinguished itself in a crowded field by emphasizing community and creativity over mere speculation.
Redefining the Fan-Creator Relationship
Chan’s strategy has focused on making blockchain technology accessible, fun and inherently social. In many ways, this is the bridge between Web2 and Web3, given that memes aren't a complicated decentralized financial system like a new automated market maker created by PhDs — they’re silly pictures of dogs and cats.
Chan sees Web3 as a chance to redefine how fans and creators interact through its approach to “proof of fandom,” in which creators can interact with fans while also building an ownership layer, something that's not possible in the Web2 world.
This synching of fans with ownership is what's missing in Web3, and what Chan sees as bringing in the masses.
“We don’t need more investors in Web3. We need more customers,” is how he put it in a fireside chat at Taipei Blockchain Week in 2023.
This profile is part of CoinDesk's Most Influential 2024 package. For all of this year's nominees, click here.
More For You
What to know:
- As of October 2025, GoPlus has generated $4.7M in total revenue across its product lines. The GoPlus App is the primary revenue driver, contributing $2.5M (approx. 53%), followed by the SafeToken Protocol at $1.7M.
- GoPlus Intelligence's Token Security API averaged 717 million monthly calls year-to-date in 2025 , with a peak of nearly 1 billion calls in February 2025. Total blockchain-level requests, including transaction simulations, averaged an additional 350 million per month.
- Since its January 2025 launch , the $GPS token has registered over $5B in total spot volume and $10B in derivatives volume in 2025. Monthly spot volume peaked in March 2025 at over $1.1B , while derivatives volume peaked the same month at over $4B.
More For You
Solana’s Drift Launches v3, With 10x Faster Trades
With v3, the team says that about 85% of market orders will fill in under half a second, and liquidity will deepen enough to bring slippage on larger trades down to around 0.02%.
What to know:
- Drift, one of the largest perpetuals trading platforms on Solana, has launched Drift v3, a major upgrade meant to make on-chain trading feel as fast and smooth as using a centralized exchange.
- The new version will deliver 10-times faster trade execution thanks to a rebuilt backend, marking the largest performance jump the project has made so far.
Top Stories
