The development journey of memecoin in crypto
With the advent of memecoins, cultural symbols and ideas and their ability to spread have now become objects of trading and speculation.
Memes spread across the internet like infectious diseases. However, instead of spreading viruses from person to person, they spread cultural symbols and ideas from mind to mind.
With the advent of memecoins, these cultural symbols and ideas and their potential for contagion have now become objects of trading and speculation. Possessing a market capitalization of more than $60 billion and a daily volume exceeding $13 billion, memecoin is becoming a significant financial asset.
It seems that every market cycle is associated with some form of memecoin, depending on the underlying technology of that cycle (proof-of-work, ERC20, NFT). Although memecoins exist on different platforms, they accumulate value in the same way: attention and community excitement.
To be able to exist in the long term, memecoin needs to possess a strong community, founder or "spokesperson" capable of creating content, promoting the brand and spreading the "meme".
Early memecoins often launched fairly (fair launch), with the founding team not being allocated tokens in advance. However, recently, memecoin projects have begun to emerge that have a closely followed founding team to increase community attention, such as PFP (Profile picture NFT) projects.
The first memecoins: 2013-2014
In 2013, Jackson Palmer, a marketing team member at Adobe Systems, and Billy Markus, a software engineer at IBM, teamed up to create Dogecoin. They were inspired by the "Doge" meme popular on the internet at that time with the image of a Shiba Inu dog.
Jackson Palmer then posted on Twitter a seemingly joking statement: “invest in dogecoin, pretty sure this will be the next big breakthrough.” Despite its non-serious origins, Dogecoin is considered a potential cryptocurrency by the community.
Dogecoin initially used the Scrypt hash function with a proof-of-work consensus algorithm, allowing miners to validate transactions on the network. However, in late 2014, Dogecoin switched to merged mining with Litecoin, allowing Litecoin Scrypt miners to simultaneously mine Dogecoin without additional fees.
Dogecoin's success has paved the way for a new generation of "cultural" tokens that use proof-of-work mechanisms that are irreverent, humorous or ironic.
After the Shiba Inu dog, the panda also became the inspiration for memecoin with Pandacoin launched on February 11, 2014, dubbed "Asian Doge-Coin" or "Doge 2.0". At this time there are also memecoins that try to appeal to a specific community, such as PotCoin, launched on January 21, 2014 for the cannabis industry.
In addition, it can be mentioned that meme coins based on celebrities such as CoinYe were born on January 2, 2014. The meme uses the image of American hip hop artist Kanye West even though West has no connection to the project. CoinYe was canceled after West filed a lawsuit against the project. Similarly, MaxCoin launched on January 29, 2014, focusing on Salvadoran-American broadcaster and film producer Max Keizer.
Memcoin and the rise of Ethereum: 2017-2018
The emergence of Ethereum has breathed new life into the market, allowing more applications to be born with better user experiences. At the same time, it also sparked the ICO (First Coin Offering) fever.
During this period, memecoin did not occupy a dominant position on the market stage, but there were still some coins that attracted attention.
For example, there is Useless Ethereum Token, launched in June 2017 to mock the idea of ICO. “I realized that people didn't really care about the product,” UET CEO, the project's anonymous founder, told the New York Observer. They only care about spending a little money, looking at the chart and then getting back a little more money."
In less than three days after its launch, this meme coin has raised more than 40,000 USD.
In addition, we can mention HayCoin launched in 2018 - the first ERC-20 standard memecoin deployed on Uniswap. Initially, Hayden Adams, founder of Uniswap, created HayCoin as a test version with low gas fees.
At that time, its trading volume was insignificant, however, last year this meme coin had a spectacular revival. The community's attention and speculation surprised Adams and led him to burn almost all of his wallet's OR supply.
Memecoin and the first NFTs: 2016 - 2019
Between 2016 - 2018, a group of smart contract protocol developers building on the Bitcoin network and Pepe meme enthusiasts created Rare Pepe Wallet, Pepe Cash and a selection of “Rare Pepe” memes for trading on Counterparty Protocol.
In September 2016, the first Rare Pepes were mined in block 428,919 on Bitcoin, which is older than the popular NFTs on Ethereum. By 2017, a community had grown around Rare Pepe digital collectibles, helping spur developers to build a platform to catalog and exchange these images.
Another example of a memecoin serving as a collectible item is Unisocks (SOCKS) launched by Hayden Adams on May 9, 2019. Essentially, Unisocks are an “experimental” NFT listed on Uniswap, representing a limited-edition pair of physical socks with flexible pricing that users can purchase anywhere in the world.
SOCKS holders can sell them through the Unisocks platform any time they want. With the current price per SOCKS being around 53,000 USD, these may be the most expensive socks in the world.
In June 2020, Compound Finance opened a new token distribution movement, in which users will be rewarded with tokens for locking their assets to provide liquidity for the project.
This “yield farming” wave kicked off the DeFi Summer with the emergence of “food” memecoins with APYs (annual yield) of up to 10,000%. We can mention Sushi, launched in August 2020, a fork of Uniswap with a token called memecoin; or Spaghetti, launched on August 21, 2020, in which users who lock assets will receive PASTA deflationary ERC-20 tokens in return.
In fact, by definition, these food-themed coins aren't exactly memecoins. However, because they were created massively to "follow" the yield farming trend without much practical meaning, people still classify them as memecoins.
Dog-themed memecoins: 2021
During the boredom and stress of the Covid pandemic, crypto traders have taken up a new hobby: trading dog-themed memecoins.
Although DOGE appeared in 2018, thanks to Elon Musk's many tweets about the Doge meme, this meme currency peaked in May 2021, with a market capitalization of 90 billion USD.
DOGE's sudden success led to a wave of dog-themed memecoins. We can mention Shiba Inu, launched in October 2021 from anonymous founder Ryoshi. Ryoshi has promoted Shiba Inu as a “Dogecoin killer,” arguing that the memecoin's technology is more “community-oriented.”
This was followed by the arrival of Floki in November 2021 from an anonymous developer who abandoned the project shortly after its launch. Floki was inspired by the name of Elon Musk's dog and is also known as "the next Shiba Inu". Just a few months after its launch, Floki has achieved a very high valuation.
New generation Memecoin: 2023 to present
As the market gradually enters the recovery phase, memecoin has emerged as one of the few segments that continues to attract widespread community attention. It can be said that many recent crazes are purely fueled by memecoins with diverse themes and approaches.
First of all, we must mention the Bitcoin network, the "big brother" of the market has also begun to enter the memecoin game with the appearance of new protocols such as Ordinals, BRC-20, Runes.
Ecosystems also develop their own memecoins: Brett (Base), Degen (Farcaster), Toise (Blast), Seiyan (Sei), Lube (Linea), COQ (AVAX)... Among them, the system's memecoin Solana stirs up the community with Bonk, Wif, Popcat.
There are also memecoins that take advantage of current popular memes on the internet such as DogWifHat, Pepe, Wojack. There are also memecoins that "follow" famous figures in the US such as Trump, Tremp, Jeo Boden...
Memecoin in the eyes of many people is quite like a hidden ticket to get rich, promoted by influential people on social networks or speculation about social trends and ideas. But no matter what, memecoin has continued to grow ever since the dawn of crypto
