Local Coffee Shop Accepts Payment in Memecoins, Now Worth More Than Starbucks
What started as a desperate attempt to attract crypto bros to a struggling coffee shop has turned "Bean There, Done That" into the world's first memecoin-powered caffeine empire, with a treasury worth more than Starbucks' market cap – at least for the next five minutes.
Owner Sarah Chen's journey from barista to blockchain billionaire began when she started accepting "literally any token that exists" as payment for coffee. "I figured some of them had to moon eventually," she explained while checking the latest value of her shop's holdings in $LATTE, $WAGMI, and something called $ELONDRINKSCOFFEE.
The shop's menu now features prices in both USD and "whatever random token you panic bought last night," with drinks like:
- The Leverage Long Latte (149,000,000 $SHEEP)
- Liquidation Espresso (Seven $BASED tokens and your tears)
- Bull Market Blend (Any token that's up 100x today)
- The Cope Cappuccino (Whatever's left in your wallet)
The strategy paid off when several tokens she accepted as payment for pumpkin spice lattes in September suddenly pumped 1000x. "Turns out some of our customers were actually devs testing their tokens' real-world utility. Who knew degens actually leave their houses?"
The shop's success has spawned its own ecosystem, including:
- $BEAN: The shop's governance token for voting on new drink recipes
- $BARISTA: Yield farming token earned by actually making coffee
- $TIP: A tipping token that somehow has more liquidity than the entire shop
Traditional finance analysts are struggling to value the business, as its treasury fluctuates between "more than the GDP of several countries" and "three fiddy" approximately every 4 minutes.
"Their balance sheet looks like someone dropped a bag of Scrabble tiles into a trading algorithm," commented one confused Wall Street analyst, who's still trying to figure out how a coffee shop owns 90% of the supply of $COFFEEINU.
The shop has become so successful that Starbucks executives were spotted in line, taking notes on how to integrate "degen tokenomics" into their rewards program. Their first attempt, $STAR, was immediately dumped on by Sarah's morning rush crowd.
Chen's innovative approach has even attracted attention from economists studying new monetary systems. "She's basically created a parallel financial ecosystem based entirely on caffeine and vibes," noted one researcher who paid for his interview in $COPIUM tokens.
The only hiccup came when a customer tried to pay with an actual dollar bill, causing several crypto natives to hiss and retreat to the corner to check their portfolio apps.
At press time, Chen was considering franchising but only to addresses that can prove they've held at least three animal tokens through a complete market cycle. She's also launching $FOAM, a token that automatically shorts Starbucks every time they raise their prices.
About the Author: Kobayashi Mememoto is an independent journalist with years of experience at the intersection of memes, crypto, and finance. Kobayashi's articles have been featured in several finance and crypto publications, with his main expertise being in memecoin trading. Mememoto's motto? "If you're not willing to lose it all on the next pump.fun jeet token, are you even investing?"
