Ten years ago on twitter, I kept getting messages from a guy called Preston Byrne about marmots. Marmots are basically the biggest squirrel in the world. Americans also call them woodchucks, although a woodchuck is a specific type of marmot, meaning all woodchucks are marmots, but not all marmots are woodchucks.
They are most populous in North America, Europe and Asia.
Preston was constantly posting pictures of marmots related to cryptocurrencies.
Yes, marmots.
Why?
Because back in the early days of blockchain mania, when every conference had someone explaining how putting something “on the blockchain” would revolutionise everything from bananas to banking, Preston developed the marmot metaphor to be an antidote to all the things advocates were saying and then invented the Marmotcoin.
Marmotcoin wasn’t really a cryptocurrency. That was the point.
Preston had noticed something important about the blockchain industry. The moment intelligent people heard the words blockchain, token or decentralised, they often stopped asking the obvious questions.
What problem are we solving? Why does this need a blockchain? Why does this need a token? Why would anyone buy it? And, perhaps most importantly, why wouldn’t a perfectly ordinary database do the job?
So, Preston introduced marmots.
His imaginary Marmotcoin had a great idea behind it for monetary policy. If you have a Marmotcoin then the issuer must be able to deliver a real, live marmot to your door if you asked.
Unlike Bitcoin, where the maximum supply is fixed at 21 million coins, the supply of Marmotcoin would be limited by the actual number of marmots.
One Marmotcoin equalled one marmot.
Try arguing with that reserve policy.
In fact, Preston started using Marmotcoin as a way to make people think properly about blockchain applications.
If your revolutionary blockchain supply-chain system could track a barrel of oil but couldn’t cope with somebody buying and delivering a “live, fuzzy, overgrown squirrel”, perhaps you hadn’t thought through the architecture quite as thoroughly as your PowerPoint presentation suggested.
I like that and like him.
It is also why marmots became part of the crypto industry’s folklore.
The strange thing is that something rather wonderful has now actually happened.
The Marmotcoin has become real.
Not Preston’s Marmotcoin exactly, but something remarkably close to the joke he started all those years ago.
Scientists at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Colorado have been studying yellow-bellied marmots since 1962. That makes it one of the world’s longest-running studies of a wild mammal population. The research has helped scientists understand how animals respond to changing environments and, increasingly, climate change.
Then the money started disappearing.
According to The Guardian, cuts to American scientific funding threatened the future of the project, leaving researchers searching for other ways to keep decades of continuous research alive.
So, the scientists did what any respectable group of wildlife researchers would do.
They joined OnlyFans with an account called OnlyMarms. Before anyone gets too excited, the marmots keep their fur on. The researchers simply used the platform to publish cute photographs and videos of their subjects and asked people to help fund the science and it worked. OnlyMarms raised around $6,000 which was good, but not enough … then crypto arrived.
Internet supporters created a meme coin called $OnlyMarms on Solana. Trading in the token generated transaction fees that were directed towards supporting the marmot researchers.
Suddenly the joke wasn’t a joke.
According to The Guardian, the cryptocurrency generated more than $88,000 in transaction fees in just two weeks, with the broader campaign raising more than $100,000, enough to help keep the research programme operating for another year.
For all the time we’ve talked about digital gold, payments, remittances and decentralised finance … maybe the killer application is marmots.
This doesn’t mean that every endangered species needs a meme coin. Please don’t take this blog as investment advice and rush out to launch PandaCoin, SaveTheWhaleCoin or ExtremelyRareFrogCoin … although I’m pretty sure they’re already out there.
In fact, the marmot researchers themselves recognise the absurdity of the situation. Scientific programmes that have operated for decades shouldn’t have to depend upon whether a meme catches fire on the internet.
The real question is government funding and science, and the serious question is why science has become dependent upon OnlyFans and a memecoin to continue their research.
Meanwhile, there is a beautiful circularity to the whole story.
Ten years ago, Preston Byrne used Marmotcoin to ridicule the more ridiculous claims being made about cryptocurrency. He invented a fictional currency backed by actual marmots and used it to force people to ask whether blockchain technology was solving a genuine problem.
Today, actual marmot researchers are being financed by an actual cryptocurrency created by people on the internet who don’t want the research into yellow-bellied marmots to disappear.
The joke has eaten reality or perhaps reality has eaten the joke.
To find out more, click on these links:
https://thenextweb.com/news/cryptocurrency-debunker-quest-save-endangered-marmots-emoji
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/18/scientists-onlyfans-marmots-crypto
Chris M Skinner
Chris Skinner is best known as an independent commentator on the financial markets through his blog, TheFinanser.com, as author of the bestselling book Digital Bank, and Chair of the European networking forum the Financial Services Club. He has been voted one of the most influential people in banking by The Financial Brand (as well as one of the best blogs), a FinTech Titan (Next Bank), one of the Fintech Leaders you need to follow (City AM, Deluxe and Jax Finance), as well as one of the Top 40 most influential people in financial technology by the Wall Street Journal's Financial News. To learn more click here...