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LUCE

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LUCE
LUCE
Image: token logo via CoinGecko / DexScreener listings
tickerLUCE
blockchainSolana
launchedOctober 28, 2024
peak market capabout 300 million dollars (mid November 2024)

LUCE is an unofficial Solana meme coin based on Luce, the Vatican's anime style mascot for the 2025 Jubilee, launched on pump.fun within hours of the mascot's unveiling in October 2024.

Contents
  1. 1 Origin
  2. 2 Market history
  3. 3 Cultural impact
  4. 4 References

LUCE is a meme coin on the Solana blockchain based on Luce, the official anime style mascot of the Catholic Church's Jubilee Year 2025. The token launched on pump.fun on October 28, 2024, the same day the Vatican unveiled the character, and became one of the fastest cultural reaction coins of the cycle, reaching a market capitalization of about 53 million dollars within six hours. It has no affiliation with the Vatican.

Origin

Luce (Italian for "light") is a cheerful pilgrim girl with blue hair, a yellow raincoat, and a pilgrim's staff, created by mascot designer Simone Legno, cofounder of the kawaii toy and fashion brand Tokidoki, and presented by Archbishop Rino Fisichella as the face of the Holy Year 2025. The design instantly went viral, with anime and internet culture communities delighted by the Church's embrace of kawaii aesthetics. Within hours, anonymous deployers had tokenized the moment on pump.fun, and one LUCE deployment won the attention war, graduating from its bonding curve and absorbing the meme's momentum. That deployer bought 67 million tokens for 2 SOL immediately after creating the token, then sold the entire stake for 2.73 SOL before handing the project to the community, a quick self dealt profit that commentary at the time called a rug pull adjacent move, even though nothing about it was illegal. The launch was widely cited as a textbook case of the pump.fun loop: cultural event, instant token, attention flywheel.

Market history

LUCE hit roughly 53 million dollars in market capitalization within its first six hours and continued climbing as the mascot dominated social feeds. By mid November 2024, at the height of the post election meme coin mania, the token traded above 0.30 dollars with its market capitalization reported at over 300 million dollars, placing it briefly among the largest coins ever launched on the platform. It then entered a long decline through December 2024 as early holders took profit and attention rotated to the ai agent meta and coins like fartcoin. The token saw a final burst of macabre relevance in April 2025, when reports of Pope Francis's death sent LUCE up more than 100 percent in a day, a move covered by mainstream crypto press as an example of event driven meme trading. CoinGecko puts the token's precise all time high at about $0.3132 on November 13, 2024, sharpening that mid November peak. Bitget listed LUCE in its Innovation and Meme Zone around the same period, running a promotional giveaway of 366,300 LUCE tokens to mark the listing. The coin's popularity also spawned rival contracts across multiple chains, including at least three separate Solana pools and a Uniswap pool on Ethereum, the same copycat pattern that later hit MarsCoin. As of mid 2026, LUCE trades roughly 99 percent below its all time high.

Cultural impact

LUCE demonstrated that by late 2024 no cultural institution was beyond the reach of the trenches: even the Vatican's marketing could be converted into a nine figure speculative asset within two weeks, without permission and without affiliation. Catholic commentators debated whether the coin was affectionate or blasphemous, while crypto media treated it as the peak expression of the reaction coin genre alongside animal coins like moo deng and peanut the squirrel. The coin also illustrated the risks of unofficial fan tokens, since buyers had no assurance the Church connection would ever be more than aesthetic.

LUCE also kept an active devoted fanbase well past its initial run. Accounts like @BelieveInLuce, describing itself as the meme account of the official mascot created by the Catholic Church, and @LuceCrusader, a self described Conscript of the holy $LUCE army, were still posting regularly as late as May 2026. On January 13, 2026, LUCE announced a trading partnership with the Trojan terminal offering 0 percent trading fees for 30 days, evidence of sustained community organizing more than a year after launch.

References

See also
  • Luna (Virtuals) Luna is the token of the first AI agent launched on Virtuals Protocol, a virtual idol and
  • MANEKI MANEKI is a Solana meme coin modeled on the Japanese maneki neko lucky cat figurine, which
  • MANLET MANLET is a Solana meme coin that spun out of the Ansem and Black Bull wave of summer 2026
  • MarsCoin MarsCoin ($MARSCOIN) is a BNB Chain memecoin launched in late July 2026 that revives the 2
  • Melania Melania is a Solana meme coin launched by First Lady Melania Trump in January 2025 that co
Category: Coins
Last updated 2026-08-19