What is a memecoin? It’s pretty simple. A memecoin, also known as a meme coin or a meme cryptocurrency, is a cryptocurrency that begins life as a joke. Its inspiration is usually a meme or an online joke. One of the best and most successful memecoins to date is the Dogecoin, which was inspired by the Doge meme, a viral image of a Shiba Inu. However, there are more, including SHIB, whose creation was inspired by the wild success of DOGE.
Overall, memecoins are not meant to be taken seriously. Despite this, they have become quite successful thanks to a huge following and a community willing to buy into them.
How Memecoins Become Valuable
A memecoin becomes valuable by gaining a huge following online, which is often due to the work of its community. Once it has a big enough online following, more investors come on board and boost the price of the coins.
A shout-out from a famous online personality can help boost a coin’s price. Elon Musk is one of the biggest celebrities to help promote the price of a memecoin. Through his online activities on Twitter and various viral interviews, Musk has helped to increase the price of Dogecoin.
Sometimes, memecoins begin life as a snub to a popular movement or personality. For instance, in December 2021, a member of the US Congress commented on a Mongoose coin, which was not a real coin at the time. Soon after, some developers came up with a Mongoose coin, which had a real community behind it.
History of Memecoins
Memecoins have existed for years now. However, some coins came into being to ride on the success of the crypto sector around the year 2020. A good example is the WallStreetBets group on Reddit, which pumped the value of GameStop’s stock. Soon after, another group on Reddit joked about pumping the price of Dogecoin. The trend soon caught on, and the price of Dogecoin climbed so much that it reached the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market cap. While some meme coins begin life as a joke, they try to build a social movement around them for a good cause.
Most Popular Memecoins
Dogecoin
The Dogecoin is a memecoin or an open source digital currency with a Shiba Inu on its logo, created by software engineers who go by the name Billy Markus from Portland, Oregon, and Jackson Palmer from Sydney, Australia. This memecoin was forked from Litecoin in December 2013, and as mentioned above, it is one of the best and most successful memecoins to date.
Dogecoin was inspired by a Doge meme, a viral image of a Shiba Inu, and was created to mock the payment system and depict it as a “joke” and also to make fun of the wild speculation in cryptocurrencies at the time. This memecoin is often considered the first “meme coin” and, more specifically, the first “dog coin.”
Shiba Inu
Shiba Inu is a memecoin which is often considered the “DOGECOIN KILLER.” This memecoin was created in August 2020 by an anonymous someone or group with the pseudonym “Ryoshi.” Shiba Inu is also one of the most successful memecoin in the crypto market today as it has been seen to be currently accepted by more than six hundred merchants all over the world.
Shiba Inu aims to be the Ethereum-based counterpart to Dogecoin’s Crypt-based mining algorithm. This memecoin gained traction when Elon Musk and Vitalik Buterin tweeted about it. Shiba Inu is listed on various exchanges, including its DEX, ShibaSwap.
MonaCoin
MonaCoin is a memecoin or an open-source, decentralized cryptocurrency and a peer-to-peer (P2P) payment network launched in January 2014. It is based on a cat-like internet meme — specifically, the popular ASCII art character, Mona.
MonaCoin was launched with no pre-mine process, and it is built on an algorithm called Lyra2RE (v2) and is based on a hard fork of Litecoin. Like most decentralized projects, this memecoin belongs to no one but all users.
Dogelon Mars
Dogelon Mars is also a dog-related memecoin. The name ‘Dogelon Mars’ is a mixture of Dogecoin and the billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, who has seemed to be a die-hard supporter of the other memecoin, Dogecoin.
This memecoin is built on the Ethereum and Polygon network, and just like its prominent cousins (other memecoins), the founder of Monacoin is also unknown.
BabyDoge
Baby doge is a memecoin inspired by its meme father, Doge, and was launched in June 2021. This dog-themed memecoin is built on the Binance Smart Chain, and it is a hyper-deflationary token designed to become more scarce over time with a static reflection that rewards holders.
Baby doge rewards holders by automatically adding more baby doge coins to the user’s wallet with each transaction. Its roadmap includes ambitious goals like further efforts for pet charity, NFT creation, GameFi, and more.
Floki Inu
Floki Inu is a dog-themed memecoin named after Elon Musk’s dog and birthed by fans and members of the Shiba Inu (SHIB) community. This memecoin appears to be calling itself “a movement “ and not a memecoin.
Its community calls itself the “Floki Vikings” in honor of Musk’s dog, Floki, which was named after a Viking character. Unlike other memecoins, the team behind Floki Inu is public. This memecoin was founded by a group of crypto influencers named B, PetaByte Capital, Sabre, and MrBrown Whale.
Pitbull
Pitbull, also known as PIT, is a dog-related memecoin that is community driven. It is built on the Binance Smart Chain, and it is run by the community. The memecoin rewards its investors through an auto-staking mechanism, which guarantees passive yield by rewarding token holders with fees from transactions that are conducted in PIT. Pitbull founders are anonymous, but the token has since been renounced to the community, and now it consists of several volunteer leads.
Their Value Does Not Last
One common thread for memecoins is that they do not last long. Except for Dogecoin, most other memecoins have fizzled out in weeks, if not days. The main reason is that they do not have much of a practical use case. While most coins in the crypto world have value as speculative assets, they have some innate usability. However, most memecoins have no practical use case. As a result, most do not last.
Besides losing value fast, most memecoins are built as obvious scams. A good example of this is the MonkeyPoxInu, a coin developed to take advantage of the mainstream focus on the monkeypox virus spreading worldwide. Soon after the coin became popular due to name recognition, the founders pulled a rug pull on the investors.
In short, while memecoins are an interesting phenomenon in the crypto sector, they generally carry more risk than all other crypto investments.
