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Meme coin

From memecoin.wiki, the free memecoin encyclopedia
Meme coin
Meme coin
Image: token logo via CoinGecko / DexScreener listings
first exampleDogecoin (December 2013)
peak eras2021 (DOGE, SHIB), 2024 to 2025 (Solana, pump.fun)
typical blockchainSolana, Ethereum, Base, BNB Chain
relatedpump.fun, the trenches, rug pull

A cryptocurrency whose value derives from internet culture, humor and attention rather than from any technical function, from Dogecoin in 2013 to the pump.fun era.

Contents
  1. 1 Dogecoin and the first joke (2013 to 2020)
  2. 2 The 2021 boom
  3. 3 Migration to Solana (2022 to 2023)
  4. 4 The pump.fun era (2024 to 2025)
  5. 5 Winter and afterlife (2026)
  6. 6 References

A meme coin (also memecoin) is a cryptocurrency whose value proposition is cultural rather than technical: a joke, an image, a celebrity, a moment. Where conventional crypto projects at least claim utility, meme coins are explicit that they are attention converted into a tradable asset. Once a market curiosity, they became by 2024 the dominant activity on the Solana blockchain and the economic engine of the trenches.

Dogecoin and the first joke (2013 to 2020)

The genre began with Dogecoin, created in late 2013 by software engineers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer as a parody that combined Bitcoin with the shiba inu "doge" meme. Intended as satire of altcoin speculation, it developed a durable community and outlived thousands of serious projects. In August 2020 an anonymous developer known as Ryoshi launched Shiba Inu (SHIB) on Ethereum as a self described Dogecoin killer with a quadrillion token supply, establishing the template of enormous supplies and pure community branding.

The 2021 boom

The 2021 bull market made meme coins a mass phenomenon. Fueled by Elon Musk's persistent Dogecoin posting, DOGE reached a market capitalization of about 97 billion dollars in May 2021, while SHIB peaked around 40 billion dollars later that year. The episode proved that meme assets could reach the market value of major corporations on sentiment alone, and it seeded the retail audience that would later populate the trenches.

Migration to Solana (2022 to 2023)

After the 2022 crash, the meme economy found a new home. BONK, airdropped to Solana users in December 2022 after the FTX collapse, revived the demoralized chain and demonstrated that a meme token could function as community infrastructure. Ethereum produced one more giant in Pepe (PEPE, April 2023), but the momentum had shifted: Solana's fast, nearly free transactions suited rapid fire speculation, and tokens like dogwifhat (WIF), launched in late 2023, minted a new generation of winners. By early 2024 Solana was the default meme coin chain.

The pump.fun era (2024 to 2025)

The launch of pump.fun in January 2024 industrialized the genre. By letting anyone deploy a token in seconds for pennies, with a bonding curve handling initial pricing, it converted meme coin creation from a technical task into a social media gesture. Millions of tokens followed, along with new professions (snipers, bundlers, KOL callers, copy traders) and new metas: political coins, animal coins, the celebrity coin wave of mid 2024, the streamer meta, and the ai agent meta of late 2024. The era's peak was the January 2025 launch of Official Trump by a sitting United States president elect, which briefly took meme coins from subculture to geopolitics, followed within weeks by the LIBRA scandal in Argentina.

The era also clarified the economics. Solidus Labs found that 98.6 percent of more than seven million pump.fun tokens studied between January 2024 and March 2025 collapsed below 1,000 dollars of liquidity, and fewer than 2 percent ever graduated from the bonding curve. In February 2025 the United States SEC staff stated that typical meme coins do not involve the offer and sale of securities, a position echoed in court rulings such as the May 2025 dismissal of the class action over Caitlyn Jenner's token. Regulation, in effect, placed meme coins closer to collectibles than to investments, leaving buyers with few remedies after collapses.

Winter and afterlife (2026)

The cycle broke in early 2026, when a market wide crash and buyer exhaustion cut Solana meme coin volumes by more than half (see 2026 memecoin winter). CoinMarketCap's 2025 recap had already noted the paradox of the era: platforms and insiders reliably profited while, in aggregate, buyers lost billions, most visibly the 3.81 billion dollars lost by nearly one million wallets on TRUMP. Yet the form persists. Meme coins have survived four boom and bust cycles by being the cheapest possible expression of internet culture in financial form, and each collapse has so far been followed by a new meta on a new venue.

References

Category: Culture