Memecoin Market Status: Doge to Shiba Inu to Pepe

Author: Eli Nuss Source: X, @nuss_eli Translation: Shan Ouba, Golden Finance

Currently, the total market value of memecoins has exceeded $100 billion. This makes it larger than DeFi (decentralized finance) and larger than decentralized Internet of Things (DePIN), games, and the metaverse combined.

Given that this asset class has become so large and diverse, we tried to map its full picture to find potential opportunities.

We looked at the best performing tokens in each quarter of this year and verified our guess: memecoins have dominated every quarter. In the first quarter, $POPCAT, $WIF, $MOG, and $MYRO performed well; in the second quarter, $PONKE, $SPX, $TURBO, $GIGA, $WOJAK, $BRETT, and $MOG were on the list; in the third quarter, $SPX, $GIGA, $FUD, and $MUMU became the leaders.

When attempting to analyze memecoins, it is important to first recognize the importance of understanding the "meta-narrative."

This is true across the crypto space, but it is particularly evident in the memecoin space. We have put together an extended timeline that attempts to highlight some of these important meta-narrative shifts and origins.

Until 2021, there was really only Doge. Then Shiba Inu was launched as the first true Doge Killer. People naturally flocked to it in hopes of recreating Doge's success. This desire to find the "next..." ultimately created a meta. Shib's success led to various other dog/Elon related memes in 2021, making it the first true memecoin meta. It was followed by Pepe in 2023, which spawned numerous frog and boys club related memecoins. Then later in 2023 we got Bonk and Wif which solidified Solana as the dominant meme chain. This peaked in the first massive memecoin craze in Q1, resulting in new memecoins appearing almost weekly or even daily. After a local peak in March, things slowed down over the summer. @MustStopMurad's framework for understanding memecoin communities and network effects became very popular, resulting in a massive influx of money into cult coins like SPX6900. More recently, as BTC has finally started to break out, we've started to see the craze restart and new metacoins forming around @truth_terminal's GOAT, the lovable hippo $MOODENG, and PEAUNT RIP.

Now that we have so many different metacoins to keep track of, we've tried to segment the market based on their categories.

As you can see, Dogecoin remains the dominant category among memecoins, driven primarily by Doge. When we started aggregating this data a few weeks ago, the Sentient AI category was barely there, and the Martyr category was virtually non-existent (with all due respect to OG $Harambe). This just goes to show how quickly this asset class has grown.

Not surprisingly, Dog Dominance has been on a downward trend since Pepe’s launch.

This trend is likely to continue as new metadata continues to form and different fields become the focus of attention.

Looking at the changes in the weights of these different categories over time, some interesting trends will emerge.

Cryptocurrency like Bitcoin was popular in 2023 when not much new capital entered the field, but starting later that year, as some new funds began to pour in, we saw crypto culture give way to the broader internet culture ($giga, $npc, ETC.).

As we mentioned before, $GOAT and $PEAUNT suddenly appeared. Although there are now a large number of AI MEMEs with a value of 9 figures, it may be too early to move them from the meta category to the new category.

Some other categories like celebrity tokens and political memes grew earlier this year but have since faded.

It’s likely that memcoin will become a part of the overall crypto market over time, with Doge acting similarly to BTC. There may be some cult coins that never sell that will stick around for a long time, but most will likely be short-lived, just as we saw with NFTs in 2021.

That being said, there is clearly a huge opportunity to get early exposure to new memes/meta.

The categories I expect to grow the fastest are internet culture and sentient AI. Internet memes are already widely recognized and culturally relevant, so they have an inherent advantage over most other categories. And sentient AI combines the most exciting technology with the most volatile asset class. They seem likely to continue to dominate the market in the meme space.

In terms of opening up, there is always room for new animals - the number of zoo animals (tigers, giraffes, zebras, etc.) on the market is staggering. In terms of something completely new, it seems likely that existing fandoms (superheroes, sports, etc.) could be tokenized in some creative way.