Are The Doge Days Really Over?

In a previous article, we covered how the rise of BRC-20 memecoins on the Bitcoin ordinal standard was breathing new life into the crypto ecosystem. Now we're here to take a more network-agnostic view on memecoins, showing you some projects worth looking at, the history of some more prominent memes/coins, and why market conditions notwithstanding, memecoins are maintaining resilient communities and competitive market caps.

Memecoin Up and Comers  - July 2023

Prez ($PREZ) - PREZ is a unique spin on Pepe - a charitable frog with the drive of a presidential candidate. The project presents itself as a utility meme coin through its novel and turnkey digital merchandising system and commitment to donate a portion of proceeds to pro-crypto governmental candidates and charitable organizations like Hope of Life, an organization that renders humanitarian aid to children, elderly, and disabled in Guatemala. The token has outperformed the market, seeing a gain of over 37% at the time of this writing, and gained a die-hard community in the process. Prez is tradeable via Uniswap and through Coinbase wallet - a vote of confidence from one of the largest exchanges in the world, and especially in the US. The Dog Days Are Over!

Pepe 2.0 ($PEPE2.0) - If you missed the first boat on $PEPE, PEPE 2.0 is your second chance to capitalize on the pepe wave - this time with a yellow pepe instead of a green one. You can poke fun at the blatant derivative nature of the token but it is up 51.5% on the 7-day chart, with very liquid markets on Uniswap.

Wall Street Memes ($WSM) - Wall Street Memes’ $WSM token secured over $300,000 on its first day on presale, shooting up to surpass $13.1 million over the next month. Wall Street Memes has over one million followers across five social media platforms, signifying a well-established, supportive community and a potentially bright future for the token.

Wojak ($WOJ) - Wojak Token is a meme coin that represents a creative extension for the Wojak meme, known for its popularity across some social media circles, especially among cryptocurrency and finance enthusiasts (“Wokajians”). They currently have over 65k followers on Twitter.

Samoyedcoin ($SAMO) - Samoyedcoin isn’t strictly new but is one of the longest-standing memecoins born out of the Solana ecosystem. Created to promote, educate and support Solana, the coin is a derivative of the wave of dog-related tokens that hit the market in 2021. Samoyed is a fantastic example of the influence dog coins have in onboarding new market participants, marketing their underlying blockchain, and infiltrating modern-day culture.

The History of Frogs and Dogs

Dogecoin ($DOGE) is one of, if not, the original memecoin - and has little need for a further introduction. It owes its genesis to a joke - created by Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer, software engineers at IBM and Adobe respectively, who decided to create an ironic “payment system” to make fun of cryptocurrency speculation. However, it didn’t take long for the joke to be on them. It was introduced on December 6, 2013, and ironically gained a sudden and tremendous amount of traction and popularity in Reddit communities, reaching a peak market capitalization of over $85 billion[a] on May 5, 2021. Multiple derivatives of the “doge” have been created in it’s image, namely: Shiba Inu ($SHIB), Floki Inu ($FLOKI), and Babydoge ($BABYDOGE).

Pepe is a cartoon character and Internet meme created by cartoonist Matt Furie. Designed as a green anthropomorphic frog with a humanoid body, Pepe originated in Furie's 2005 comic Boy's Club,  in a series of blog posts on Myspace in 2005. The character became an Internet meme when his popularity steadily grew across websites such as Myspace, Gaia Online, and 4chan in 2008. By 2015, he had become one of the most popular memes used on 4chan and Tumblr.

The coin, $PEPE, launched in mid-April 2023 and is currently the #69 cryptocurrency (hehe) according to CMC at the time of this writing. PEPE’s official Twitter account describes the token as the “most memeable memecoin in existence,” adding that the “dogs have had their day.” Since then, others have followed suit, similarly giving rise to a plethora of frog tokens hoping to ride the coattails of its success. Some of these coins include Prez Pepe, McPepe’s, PepeAI, Saudi Pepe, Trans Pepe, BOB Token, and JIM token.

Memecoins really gained traction after “meme stocks” such as GameStop (GME) and AMC Entertainment (AMC) saw their prices pump by as much as 100-fold in a few months during late 2020 by a Reddit community called WallStreetBets. The crypto community quickly followed suit. In January 2021, a Reddit group joked about pumping up the price of DOGE to create a crypto equivalent of GME. That idea gained momentum, accompanying the influence of Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s tweets, and the price of DOGE rallied. In a matter of only five days, Dogecoin had increased by 2,000% — reaching a new all-time high of $0.73.

Derivative coins often accrue value through retail FOMO - the fear of missing out on becoming overnight millionaires, creating a positive feedback loop of meme rallies. Meme coins are heavily community-driven tokens. Sans any fundamental economic or business use-cases, their prices are heavily influenced by social media and online sentiment. Hype and FOMO often work together to bring communities together in what has been a bizarre social experiment showcasing the power of decentralized but systemized coordination, and the allure of a quick payday.

A recent trend has been meme coins emerging as utility meme coins. One example is Pawthereum ($PAWTH), which uses a small tax on each transaction to help animal charities, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars in the process. Another trend, like Prez Pepe ($PREZ), has been raising money for political contributions in a fun and anonymous manner.

Ultimately, the coins themselves mirror the high-thrills, volatility-seeking, degen nature of the investors who load up on them. While some coins are likely to rise and fall back into obscurity, human nature won’t. Amusement, the hankering for wagers, and the pursuit of quick thrills are not going away anytime soon - and on the contrary will likely intensify in the face of technological and social progress that offer us more of what we want, delivered in a shorter amount of time.

Crypto fund DFG founder James Wo, has famously said that “[memecoins] are huge parts of the crypto trading landscape, whether we like it or not”.

We embrace it, or we hate it. Either way, memecoins are here to stay.