Ethereum

From memecoin.wiki, the free memecoin encyclopedia

Ethereum
Image: token logo via CoinGecko / DexScreener listings
ticker	ETH
chain	own chain, layer 1
launched	July 30, 2015
creator	Vitalik Buterin and cofounders
all time high	about $4,946 (August 2025)

Ethereum is the smart contract blockchain whose ERC20 standard made permissionless token creation possible, serving as the meme coin culture's ancestral homeland from the ICO era through PEPE before Solana took the flow.

Contents

1 Ancestor of the launchpad
2 PEPE and the Ethereum meme scene
3 2026
4 References

Ethereum (ETH) is the blockchain that made tokens a commodity. Launched on July 30, 2015 from a project led by Vitalik Buterin, its smart contracts and the ERC20 standard reduced creating a currency to filling in a template, the precondition for every meme coin economy that followed. If Bitcoin proved money could be permissionless, Ethereum proved anyone could issue it, and the trenches are downstream of that discovery.

Ancestor of the launchpad

The 2017 ICO boom was the first industrial scale token mania, thousands of ERC20 sales that established the grammar later perfected by pump.fun: a ticker, a story, a chart, and a crowd deciding in real time what it was worth. Projects raised over 20 billion dollars industry wide that year, including EOS alone raising over 4 billion dollars, while ETH itself ran from about 8 dollars to a yearly high near 882 dollars, the first mania the chain's token standard made possible. The joke coin genre predates 2020 by years: the Useless Ethereum Token, launched in June 2017 explicitly to mock the ICO format by promising literally nothing, still raised 310 ETH from buyers in on the joke, an early direct ancestor of purely ironic meme coins. The 2020 to 2021 cycle added the DEX native meme coin. DeFi summer 2020 produced the "food coin" farming meta, with protocols like Yam and Pickle offering annualized yields above 10,000 percent paid in freshly minted tokens, while total value locked across DeFi grew from about 700 million dollars at the start of 2020 to about 15 billion dollars by year end. Shiba Inu, launched in 2020 by the pseudonymous Ryoshi, showed a Dogecoin clone on Uniswap could reach a top ten market capitalization (see shiba inu), and trading new pairs through gas wars and snipers was the proto trenches before the term existed. Vitalik Buterin's meme coin holdings became a recurring charity mechanism: in May 2021 he donated 50 trillion SHIB tokens, then worth about 1.2 billion dollars, to the India Covid Relief Fund after first burning over 6 billion dollars worth, roughly 90 percent of his total holding, and in 2023 he added another 10 million dollars from further SHIB sales to the same cause.

PEPE and the Ethereum meme scene

Pepe (PEPE), launched in April 2023, is Ethereum's definitive meme coin, a stealth launch that ran to a multibillion dollar capitalization and revived the format on the chain that invented it. But Ethereum mainnet's fees made 2024 era velocity impossible, and the center of meme coin gravity moved to Solana, where blockspace was cheap enough for the meme coin casino to run at full speed. Ethereum's meme culture partly migrated to its layer 2s, most visibly Base, home of the clanker deployer bot and the Bankr agent economy.

2026

Ethereum entered 2026 off an all time high near 4,946 dollars set in August 2025, then fell with the broader market; as of August 18, 2026 ETH traded around 1,896 dollars, rangebound roughly between 1,850 and 1,975 dollars for the week, still down about 62 percent from its August 2025 peak. Buterin declared 2026 a year for reclaiming decentralization and privacy, publishing a Lean Ethereum roadmap centered on privacy tooling and quantum resistant cryptography. On crypto twitter Ethereum discourse runs on a permanent cycle of obituaries and revivals, mocked as a dino chain by Solana natives and defended as the settlement layer institutions will eventually need, while its role in meme history, the chain where token culture was born, is not in dispute.

Ethereum

Ancestor of the launchpad

PEPE and the Ethereum meme scene

2026

References