There's no driving narrative from the crypto industry to inspire grassroots investors to believe its future is in making stuff that will be useful in the world, says Regan Bozman of Lattice, an investor in early stage companies.

Why it matters: We're in the middle of a crypto boom, which means a lot of financial power is gathering with no clear place for that energy to flow — so a lot of it is going into memecoins.

The big picture: Bozman's thinking on this is heavily informed by that of Travis Kling, of Ikigai Asset Management, who wrote a popular series of social media posts recently about financial nihilism.

• The basic idea: In a world where it's harder than ever for young people to attain stability, they are going to take bets rather than make safe investments.
• With the cost of things like homes growing as fast as they have, relative to income, safe investments — like S&P index funds and treasuries — don't grow fast enough. Betting is actually rational in this world.

What they're saying: "The vast majority of people in crypto are here to make money," Bozman tells Axios.

• That is, while investors like him might be investing to help crypto projects achieve their useful ends, that's not what the masses have come for.
• "The crypto industry hasn't packaged and bundled a new narrative that people can get excited about," Bozman says, but he actually took that a bit further.

The friction point: Crypto's big investors, the VC funds, have been focused on the roads and tunnels of the industry, funding more and more blockchains, bridges and exchanges — never quite satisfied with the ones that have come so far.

• Each one promises that it will be the one that's fast enough, flexible enough to bring a bright new future.
• Most of what they bring are new tokens and coins, which VCs bought low and sold high to retail investors, until they fiddle into nothingness from then on.

"I think folks are tired of hearing the same narrative," Bozman says.

• He's still investing in a better future, but that doesn't necessarily mean he thinks those investments will pay off in the near term.

Put all this together, and we arrive at the mania for meme coins right now.

• To Kling, this means that in this cycle, retail is likely to just skip any pretense that the technology has value and place very short-term bets on funny ideas that pop.

The bottom line: "Meme coins are just more fun," Bozman says.

As the kids say, there's a lot to unpack here.

Reality check: Speaking of financial nihilism, the interplay of thematically related meme coins like these are at the heart of all of that.

Zoom out: All of these tokens represent popular internet archetypes. If we took the Freudian construct of the id, ego and superego and overlaid them with these memes, then the breakdown here is easy.

• Wojak, the feels guy, is the superego. He's the one who can get angry, who can cry, who is tapped into a values system.
• Pepe is the id, the trickster. Things feel good to Pepe independent of values.
• Normie is the ego. Normie the mythical "regular person." Normie is not very online. He does not have a folder of memes on his phone. He has never posted on 4chan.
• Normie does not need to "touch grass" because that's his whole life.

Vibe check: As the pandemic era has shaken off, there's a growing suspicion that the not-very-online, the ones who don't get their jokes, who don't know that people on Reddit call them "normies" had it right all along.

By the numbers: The market cap of NORMIE (on Base) is only $46 million and WOJAK (on Ethereum) is only $49 million.

• PepeCoin (on Ethereum) is $600 million.

The bottom line: Nevertheless, there could be a larger message in the fact that WOJAK and NORMIE are rising fast while PEPE has been basically flat in recent days.

The House yesterday passed the first major piece of legislation that would provide regulatory clarity to the cryptocurrency industry.

Why it matters: The industry has long complained that there was no way to operate in a way that conformed with U.S. regulations (other than to just not operate at all).

Driving the news: The Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act, known on the Hill as FIT21, passed in the House yesterday afternoon by a vote of 279-136, with 71 Democrats voting in favor.

• The Biden administration had issued a policy statement earlier in the day opposing passage of the bill, though it stopped short of expressing a veto threat.

The intrigue: Democratic support for the bill was up by 50 votes compared with the party's "yeas" two weeks earlier to overturn the SEC's rules for cryptocurrency custody accounting. (Both passed in the chamber.)

What they're saying: "The current regulatory framework for our securities and commodities market structure simply was not designed for and does not work for digital assets," the law firm Davis Polk wrote in a client update about the legislation, published on Monday.

The other side: FIT21 "would create new regulatory gaps and undermine decades of precedent regarding the oversight of investment contracts, putting investors and capital markets at immeasurable risk," SEC chair Gary Gensler said in a statement released yesterday morning prior to the vote.

• "The self-certification process contemplated by the bill risks investor protection not just in the crypto space; it could undermine the broader $100 trillion capital markets."

What's next: The legislation goes to the Senate.

Crystal Kim provided additional reporting

💰 OKX predicts $500 million for ether ETFs first week. (DL News)

🎢 If ETH does what BTC did after an ETF approval, it will go up 60%. (CoinDesk)

👨‍⚖️ Prosecutors ask for five to seven years for FTX executive Ryan Salame. (Blockworks)

🪙 Tokenization would increase individual participation in private equity, alternative investment giant Hamilton Lane believes. (Axios)

🐕 Coinbase lost before the Supreme Court (on arbitration — not crypto). (Axios)

Two investors and prominent Crypto Twitter denizens are going to actually fight in Austin, during Consensus 2024.

• Nic Carter versus David Hoffman.

Background: It's under the auspices of Karate Combat, a token-powered sports betting application in which no one loses (their principal — crypto thing / I'll explain it all later).

The bottom line: Number go up? Yes, but someone's going down.