What do Moo Deng the pygmy hippo, social media sensation Hawk Tuah, and the President of the United States all have in common? They’ve all inspired highly valuable, highly volatile memecoins. The memecoin began as a sort of joke cryptocurrency, but it soon became very real.

On today’s episode of The Sunday Story, we turn to our friends at NPR’s Planet Money to help us understand the phenomenon of memecoins. What are they, and how did they go from a one-off joke to a speculative frenzy worth tens of billions of dollars? Who are the winners and losers in this brazen new market?

The Planet Money episode was reported by Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi and Nic Neves. It was produced by Willa Rubin and edited by Jess Jiang with help from Keith Romer. Additional production for The Sunday Story by Justine Yan. Fact-checking by Sierra Juarez and engineering by Neal Rauch.

We’d love to hear from you. Send us an email at TheSundayStory@npr.org.