Tokens whose name and mascot refer to a pop culture phenomenon are constantly in the news, but occupy a tiny part of the cryptocurrency market. By the end of autumn, only 1.8% of crypto transactions were memcoins. Some coins are stable plus or minus, but this is the exception to the rule. More often they behave like one-day butterflies, their flight is short. However, let's be honest: you can make money on them. If you came to the crypt for “hundreds and thousands of X’s.”
Oh those dogs
The Shiba Inu dog became known to all cryptocurrency lovers back in 2013. Some have since made money from other people's fascination with this cute creature.. From December 2013 to December 2023, the DOGE coin increased in price from $0.00008547 to $0.10. The price peak was at $0.70.
In 2014, after Elon Musk's tweets, DOGE was among the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization. Moreover, the creators of Dogecoin, Billy Marcus and Jackson Palmer, received virtually no benefit from their invention. Palmer left the project in 2015, and Marcus bought a used Honda Civic with his coins and left it at that.. It's not enough to come up with a good meme. You need to be able to use it.
The family of dog coins is worthily replenished with the Shiba Inu coin, born in 2020. Since the official launch in August 2020, a total of quadrillion SHIB tokens have been issued. This is a number with fifteen zeros! Unlike the Great Danes, the creator of Shiba is an anonymous person known to the crypto community under the nickname RYOSHI. Now the Shibu coin is worth about $0.00001. However, multiplying this relatively simple amount by a quadrillion, we get one of the leading meme cryptocurrencies by market capitalization ($10 billion). The creator of SHIB did not keep a single coin for himself (at least so it is believed), and all buyers of this memcoin were initially on equal terms. For about eight months nothing happened to the coin. The rate was slowly rising.
However, in March 2021, Elon Musk posted on Twitter that he wanted a Shiba Inu. The billionaire meant a puppy of this breed, not a coin. But there was no stopping the buyers. Elon Musk, his Twitter page and one publication with a photo of a puppy were enough to get memcoin into the top 20 by capitalization. In five days, the price of SHIB increased 20 times, by 2000%. And from January to October 2021 – by more than 27 million percent. In October 2021, an unknown large buyer spent $1.2 million on SHIB coins. To maintain the price, the creators of Shiba Inu created an ecosystem of three coins, SHIB, LEASH and BONE, and the decentralized exchange ShibaSwap. Technically, Shiba Inu is an ERC-20 token on the Ethereum blockchain.
Pepe era
Pepe is a green frog with a difficult fate.. At first, for some reason, American ultra-rightists and neo-Nazis fell in love with this comic book character. And then, in April 2023, Pepe reincarnated as the most popular meme coin. The artist who created the character Pepe for the comics himself says that the craze surrounding the PEPE cryptocurrency has not brought him a dime.
A total of 420 trillion PEPE were issued (reference to another meme, this time related to marijuana: 4.20, the time when it is customary for North Americans to inhale illicit weed). PEPE's market capitalization reached $1 billion in just three weeks since launch. And in a little more than a month, this cryptocurrency has risen in price 10,000 times.
Memecoin madness
After Pepe, memetic tokens flooded the cryptocurrency market. Almost immediately Pepe was followed by LADYS coins, generated by another tweet from Elon Musk. The Milady collection was created in 2021 by digital artist group Remilia and consists of 10,000 anime avatars. After Musk published one of the pictures on his favorite social network in 2023, pure madness began.
Crypto whales paid a weighted average price of $0.0000000037604 for the LADYS token, and at its peak the value of LADYS reached approximately $0.00000012. According to CoinGecko, this gave a capital gain of 3,091 times.
This is not the first time that tweets and other statements by Elon Musk have given rise to crypto coins.. In 2021, even analysts from Pipslay announced that 37% of American investors make decisions based on tweets from the creator of Tesla and SpaceX.
In the summer of 2023, coins began to appear en masse on the Base blockchain (a second-level solution for the Ethereum network from the American exchange Coinbase). One of these tokens, BALD, saw a 289,000% increase in price in just the first 14 hours from the start of trading.. This is despite the fact that the token has no official website, benefit or any visible purpose. Four different wallet addresses exchanged 0.5 ETH, worth about $950 at the time, for BALD within the first four minutes of trading. Eight hours later, these wallet addresses exchanged their BALD for ETH for a total of 554 ETH, which at prices at the time was over $1 million. Another memecoin with the ticker BASED also experienced an incredible rally: in 20 hours it increased by more than 1,000,000%. The coin’s capitalization amounted to $1.39 billion, which turned out to be more than that of the developed blockchain networks Aave and Optimism (OP). However, the BASED coin soon fell in price and is now of little interest to anyone.
Now, at the end of 2023, the memecoin madness continues. LINDA token price skyrocketed 8,000% overnight: After listing on Uniswap three days ago, the new meme coin rose to a high of $0.00008577. LINDA was named after ConsenSys founder Joe Lubin's pet dog.. However, the coin has already begun to fall in price. Another new hype memcoin, Bitcoin ETF Token raised $3.4 million during its pre-sale.
The most successful memcoins
The top 20 memcoins according to Coinmarketcap in December 2023 are as follows:
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Dogecoin. Familiar to almost all crypto market participants. Litecoin clone. It costs 10-11 cents for one DOGE coin. Emission is not limited. Capitalization reaches $10 billion.
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Shiba Inu. The peak of popularity has already passed, but the community remains faithful to the cryptocurrency and expects “new X’s” from it.
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Pepe. The coin was born in April 2023 and has since grown significantly in price, possibly having already passed its peak.
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Floki. In June 2021, Elon Musk announced on Twitter that he would give his pet Shiba Inu the name Floki, and the appearance of a coin with the name Floki Inu on the market was not long in coming. When Elon Musk announced on September 12 that his family had finally purchased a dog, the FLOKI token was already being traded in full swing on the market. Floki coin is available on both the Ethereum network and the Binance blockchain.
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Memecoin. It was created by the Memeland studio with the participation of the 9GAG platform, where users often post various humorous content. There are 69 billion MEME coins in total. The cryptocurrency is quite popular and is traded on Binance. At the time of listing, the MEME coin cost $0.00100, and a day later it was already $0.028, an increase of +2743%.
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Bone ShibaSwap. Coin from the Shiba Inu ecosystem. Governance, staking, liquidity token.
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Bonk. Memcoin on the Solana blockchain. Created at the end of December 2021. Available on Binance and KuCoin. The price peak passed in October-November 2022.
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Baby Doge coin. BEP-20 token created on the Binance blockchain. In just two weeks after its introduction on June 1, 2021, the price increased by 1,000%. In the third week, the coin's market capitalization reached a staggering $200 million, and in the fourth week, the number of owners of this cryptocurrency was 160,000 people.
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HarryPotterObamaSonic10Inu (What? Yes!) One of the top 10 memcoins, but not burdened with any meaning.
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Dogelon Mars. ERC-20 token on the Ethereum network with a capitalization of more than $240 million. The active Twitter base exceeds 500,000 fans.
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Wall Street Memes. Cryptocurrency from the creators of a popular NFT collection themed around Wall Street memes. Elon Musk mentioned the WSM coin in his tweets, which means it will flounder for some time.
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Doge Killer (LEASH). It is related to the Shiba Inu ecosystem, however, these coins are not a quadrillion, like Shiba Inu, but only 107,647 pieces. Cost over $300 each. Token standard ERC-20.
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RichQUACK.com. QUACK token on the BSC network. 100 quadrillion units produced. More than half have already been burned to increase the price of the remaining asset.
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ArbDoge AI. Experimental coin on the Arbitrum network. Released in the amount of 210 trillion pieces, there is annual burning. The AI prefix is here purely for the sake of marketing.
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TokenFi. TOKEN token on Ethereum and BNB Smart Chain networks. Its attractive feature is staking with good interest rates.
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Dejitaru Tsuka (no, you're not imagining it). TSUKA is an ERC-20 token with a circulation of 1 billion coins. According to legend, the founders of the project are related to meditation and Buddhism.
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MonaCoin. Litecoin fork of Japanese origin. Lyra2RE algorithm, mining available. Mintage: 105,120,000 MONA coins.
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Samoyedcoin. Dog meme coin on the Solana blockchain. At the best of times, the price reached 25 cents. It seems that it has already lost its position to the dog-coin Bonk and will soon sink into oblivion.
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Milady Meme Coin. LADYS coins originated from Elon Musk's tweet and is a meme token on the Ethereum (ERC20) blockchain. The developers of Milady NXT were accused of stealing $1 million in the fall.
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Kishu Inu. The coin is named after the Japanese dog breed. A total of 100 quadrillion coins have been issued.. Technically, this is a token on the Ethereum blockchain, ERC20 standard.
…And then in the first hundred of their kind there are Pepe 2.0, Shiba Predator, HarryPotterObamaPacMan8Inu, CumRocket, KEKE, Loser Coin… Thousands of them have already experienced their “moment of glory,” and tens of thousands of those that “didn’t take off” remained useless garbage.
Keep in mind: due to the volatility of the cryptocurrency market in general and memecoins in particular, the rating changes with the frequency of the birth of meme pictures on social networks.
Failed memecoins
The vast majority of examples are when a memcoin fizzles out in a matter of days and ceases to interest even a seemingly devoted audience.. If we visit the cemetery of dead coins, we will see on the signs many names indicating belonging to memcoins: JesusCoin, PayCon, AssPennies, CryptoMeth, ObamaCoin…
The SQUID project, supposedly created by the creators of the series “The Squid Game,” made a lot of noise in its time.. SQUID coins were sold as utility coins for a future game based on the series. The series was at the peak of its popularity, and it is not surprising that in just a month the coin grew by 45,000%. And then it collapsed to zero due to the fact that the creators of the coin withdrew funds through a smart contract embedded in the coin’s code.
The developers of the SQUID coin received about $3.4 million. This happened back in October 2021. Now the SQUID coin is still in demand! And even recently the price went up from 1 to 2 cents. Transactions with the coin are carried out on the Pancake Swap decentralized exchange.
There are also meme tokens whose life cycle is immediately designed for days, or even hours.. For example, on Bitcoin Pizza Day, coins BTCPizza, BPizza, PizzaDay and EthPizza appeared, which together collected about $300,000 in revenue. No development was envisaged for these coins.
Or an even wilder story: rumors of aliens at the end of July 2023 gave rise to a total of about 50 ephemera coins in some way associated with distant civilizations. All of them lost their value in a matter of days.
How to assess the chances of memcoin
Memcoin, from a technical point of view, is just records in the blockchain. And since blockchain technology is based on maximum transparency, you can always find wallets that took part in transactions with successful memecoins and track which meme coins they are interested in now.
For example, we find the wallet of one of the organizers of an enterprise selling cryptocurrency PEPE. Investments of 0.19 ETH have already turned into 8.87 trillion PEPE. Soon he exchanged 7.76 trillion PEPE for $1.23 million. Thus, the initial investment increased by 3200 times.
The easiest way to detect a “memcoin whale” wallet is to use the services of Etherscan, DEXTools, DeBank, DexCheck and Dune Analytics.
Etherscan is the world's most popular Ethereum blockchain explorer. It allows you to track the price, volume and market value of any ERC-20 token, as well as transaction data. You can check the activity of the largest token holders or wallets belonging to the project team. If a particular memecoin is on sale, it's probably not the best time to buy it.. Another feature of Etherscan is the ability to quickly check how many wallets on the network hold a particular token. A good way to quickly assess whether memcoin is gaining popularity or has already reached its peak. Similar tools exist for other blockchains. For example, BSCScan is a good explorer for BNB Chain, and Solscan is for those who want to check activity on the Solana blockchain.
DEXTools – using this platform you can search for the most viewed trading pairs, trading volumes, daily value gains. You can see a list of all liquidity pools for any coin of interest. There is a function for tracking the activity of large wallets. You can set up alerts for events: price movements, position liquidation, token exchange.
With DeBank you can check which tokens a particular blockchain address owns, as well as all its transactions. If you're wondering how to find new memecoins early on, one of the best ways is to monitor the activity of smart money addresses that have made highly profitable trades in the past.. For example, you can check for memcoins that have gone up in value in the past and find addresses on DeBank that bought those coins early. DeBank's built-in messenger allows you to directly communicate with any 0x address and track multiple addresses in a batch.
The DexCheck platform combines data from decentralized cryptocurrency exchanges. As a rule, memcoins are initially launched on DeFi platforms. This means monitoring activity on DEX is important for discovering new memcoins in the early stages of their life cycle. Using DexCheck, you can search for today's growth leaders on decentralized exchanges on the Ethereum network. The DexCheck platform is equipped with a cryptocurrency whale tracking feature, allowing you to see transactions made by large coin holders.
Dune Analytics will reveal additional data about coins and transactions usually hidden from the general public. The interface is complex, but this information can give you an advantage over other market participants. If you have some SQL skills, you can use the platform to create your own dashboards.
CoinCodex shows technical analysis indicators. RSI, MACD, moving averages and other classic indicators when applied to new coins can indicate the emergence of a trend associated with a new memecoin. By comparing the meme coin pages with the indicators on CoinCodex, you can be one of the first to find a new, progressive memecoin.
In addition, it is worth using Twitter (social network X) to analyze the growth of communities associated with meme tokens. For example, it is worth following the useful Twitter account Lookonchain: here they monitor transactions on the blockchain made by “smart money addresses”. You can add the addresses listed here and track them yourself using DeBank or other DeFi portfolio trackers. There are a number of communities on Telegram and Discord.
How to make your own memecoin
For example, by connecting artificial intelligence. Memcoin TURBO, for example, was completely made according to the prompts of the ChatGPT neuroservice. Without further ado, its creator asked: how to make a popular memecoin. With only $69 of starting capital on hand. And then followed the AI's prompts exactly. True, now repeating this experience is as pointless as painting another “Black Square” by Malevich.
A new memecoin has a much greater chance of success if it is launched on some new blockchain. For example, the ORDI coin was successful as it was one of the first meme tokens to use the Bitcoin Ordinals protocol. Quite a few new generation meme coins have emerged and are still emerging on the Arbitrum network.
There are successful memcoins on the new BASE blockchain. This is a second layer solution for the Ethereum blockchain. Thanks to BASE, memecoins such as BALD and BASED emerged.
The popularity of tokens on the TON blockchain is growing (here they are called Jettons). A small commission for creating a coin (10 TON), the opportunity to inexpensively get on DEX, of which there are plenty on this network, and most importantly, the active and involved TON community make Jettons a good choice for a beginning meme modeler.
Try it, maybe you will be lucky enough to create a new hype token that will make XXXXXXXXXXX.
This material and the information contained herein do not constitute individual or other investment advice.. The editors' opinions may not coincide with the opinions of the author, analytical portals and experts.