The original idea behind creating Bitcoin and major alternative cryptocurrencies was convenience, security, transaction speed, and societal benefit. However, in recent years, a trend of meme coins has been gaining popularity—coins that don’t carry anything useful or valuable but are simply associated with jokes and popular memes.
In 2024, meme coins have become a trend, and their growth outpaces the entire cryptocurrency market by 5-7 times. Here are the top most well-known and popular meme coins in 2024.
Dogecoin (DOGE)
- Blockchain: Own;
- Market Cap: $25 billion (as of March 2024);
- All-Time High: $0.57;
- All-Time Low: $0.00011;
- Circulating Supply: 143 billion.
- A famous meme coin created as a joke based on the Shiba Inu dog, Dogecoin owes its popularity to Elon Musk, who mentioned the coin several times on his Twitter, causing an immediate price spike. At one point, it was even possible to officially buy a Tesla car with DOGE.
- Essentially, DOGE became the precursor to all meme coins. Created as a joke to show how crazy the world of cryptocurrencies could be, the token enriched many and sparked a new wave of interest in digital money.
Shiba Inu (SHIB)
- Blockchain: Ethereum;
- Market Cap: $16 billion (as of March 2024);
- All-Time High: $0.000072;
- All-Time Low: $0.00000000017;
- Circulating Supply: 589 trillion.
- It’s no surprise that the next most popular meme token is also dog-related. It’s simply named after the breed that inspired DOGE: the Shiba Inu. Immediately after the token’s release, half of its supply was burned.
- The development team simply sent these funds to Vitalik Buterin’s wallet (the creator of Ethereum and, according to some conspiracy theories, one of the two creators of SHIB). The creators of this cryptocurrency even launched their own decentralized exchange, ShibaSwap, in 2021.
Pepe (PEPE)
- Blockchain: Ethereum;
- Market Cap: $3.2 billion (as of March 2024);
- All-Time High: $0.00001;
- All-Time Low: $0.00000022;
- Circulating Supply: 420 trillion.
- The story of the token, created in honor of the Pepe frog, began with a post in X, with a picture where the meme character was wearing a cap with the inscription in English — «Let’s make meme coins great again.» Two weeks later, a coin with the same name appeared, the price of which increased by more than 900% in one day. Interestingly, the illustrator Matt Furie, who created the frog in 2005, repeatedly admitted that he knew nothing about the release of PEPE and called himself a staunch fan of Dogecoin.
dogwifhat (WIF)
- Blockchain: Solana;
- Market Cap: $2.7 billion (as of March 2024);
- All-Time High: $3.4;
- All-Time Low: $0.078;
- Circulating Supply: 998 million.
- Once again, a Shiba Inu dog. This time in a hat — the name of the token is loosely translated from English, where the preposition is spelled incorrectly, and translates as «dog with a hat».
- The creators never claimed serious status for the coin and even insisted that the name of this cryptocurrency always be written in lowercase. It is with WIF that the famous story is connected when a trader who bought a new meme coin for entertainment for about $310, turned them into $1.4 million in a few months.
FLOKI (FLOKI)
- Blockchain: Ethereum;
- Market Cap: ~$2.2 billion (as of March 2024);
- All-Time High: $0.0003;
- All-Time Low: $0.0000014;
- Circulating Supply: 9 trillion.
- It would be surprising if, after Elon Musk announced that he named his dog (of course, a Shiba Inu) Floki, someone didn’t release a corresponding token.
- A deflationary coin (holders receive profit simply for holding coins) immediately got into a scandal. The main developer took 20% from each transaction and sent them to his wallet. It was then that the Floki Inu project was captured by a famous crypto community calling themselves Vikings, and the token was renamed to FLOKI.
Bonk (BONK)
- Blockchain: Solana;
- Market Cap: $1.5 billion (as of March 2024);
- All-Time High: $0.000037;
- All-Time Low: $0.00000014;
- Circulating Supply: 93 trillion.
- Bonk is the first «dog» meme coin created on the Solana blockchain. Exactly half of the initial emission in the form of an airdrop was given to the community of this ecosystem. This was done to support the Solana ecosystem after a sharp drop in the coin’s price. Indeed, the appearance of BONK sparked activity in the ecosystem: the release of new meme tokens, actions with burning coins, the creation of NFT collections, and so on.
