Born from internet culture and driven by virality rather than fundamentals, memecoins have become one of the most unpredictable yet captivating segments in crypto. From Dogecoin’s ironic beginnings to Solana’s high-speed minting frenzy, these tokens are less about utility and more about community, humor, and speculative energy. In this article, I describe the patterns I discovered while analyzing them.
Note: All data was collected on Coingecko on April 24, 2025.
- 2013 — Dogecoin (DOGE)
Created as a joke based on the Shiba Inu meme, DOGE pioneered the memecoin genre. It remained a fringe asset until 2021, when Elon Musk’s tweets catapulted it into the mainstream with a market cap in the tens of billions. - 2020 — Shiba Inu (SHIB)
Launched as the self-proclaimed “Dogecoin killer,” SHIB gained massive traction with retail investors through aggressive marketing, exchange listings, and a growing ecosystem of DeFi tools and NFTs. - 2021–2023 — Baby Doge, Floki Inu, SafeMoon, and Others
A wave of meme-driven coins flooded the market, many offering tokenomics gimmicks (e.g., reflections, auto-burns) and celebrity shills. Most saw meteoric rises followed by equally fast crashes. - 2024–2025 — Solana & Base Meme Boom
Tools like Pump.fun and LaunchLab enabled near-instant minting of memecoins on Solana, leading to a surge in daily launches and volume…
