2 Meme Coins That Could Surpass Shiba Inu in 2022

While Shiba Inu strives to evolve from its “meme coin” roots, it could be a victim of its own success.

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Key points

• Dogecoin competitor Shiba Inu (SHIB) ran up 49,000,000% in gains last year and has a massive market cap of $16.7 billion.
• That huge market cap is a blessing for past investors and a curse to new ones. It will not allow SHIB’s price to increase 100 times this year because that would give it a $1.67 trillion market valuation — nearly the size of the entire crypto market.
• If you love meme coins, there are two options that stand out in their respective use cases and both have valuations less than $100 million — so there’s plenty of room to run.

Most of us are familiar with how dog-themed meme cryptocurrency Shiba Inu (SHIB) started as a joke coin in August 2020, and then rocketed more than 49,000,000% last year. Since then SHIB developers have tried to build more value into the ecosystem by launching a decentralized exchange, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), complementary coins, and an ambitious blockchain that tested well during a beta run.

On top of all that, it has amassed a rabidly loyal following of millions of supporters — SHIB’s official Twitter feed has 2.8 million subscribers — who refer to their collective as “SHIBArmy.” If you spend any amount of time in that community via Twitter or Reddit, you see their dogged conviction that Shiba Inu will repeat and easily reach $0.01 on its way to $1.00 per token from its current price of $0.0000301 as of this writing, per CoinMarketCap.

But for SHIB to reach just a penny per token, given its current supply, would require a 33,000% pump, creating an astronomical market cap. Even a comparatively modest increase to its price by 100 times would give it a $1.67 trillion market cap — nearly the size of the entire $1.91 trillion crypto market, which will not happen anytime soon. So in the meantime, here are two alternative meme coins with much smaller total valuations that could more easily allow five-digit percentage gains.

Samoyedcoin trading volume is up 25% over the past 24 hours

Samoyedcoin (SAMO) is a dog-themed token that launched last year on the increasingly popular Solana blockchain. SAMO is a growing digital asset that’s intended to serve as an on ramp for new crypto users to the Solana network. According to CoinMarketCap, while writing this, SAMO transaction volume was up more than 25% on the day.

Samoyedcoin also has a finite number of tokens capped at 9.2 billion and has had three separate token burns since its inception to maintain value. Speaking of value, its total market cap is only $74 million. Even if its price increased 100 times this year, its market cap would barely place in the top-100 crypto projects based on valuation. This could be a hidden meme gem worth considering.

Monacoin, a veteran meme coin with real utility

Conversely, MonaCoin (MONA) has been around since January 2014 with no pre-mine process, which has ensured its open-source decentralized model has continued to endure. Like Dogecoin, it was based on a hard fork of Litecoin, and MONA is extremely popular in Japan as the token logo is based on a widely recognized cat character in that country. Peer-to-peer payment tech is the underlying functionality behind the project, and MONA is the native token used to reward its proof-of-work miners who validate network activity.

At the time of writing, MONA was priced at $1.03, a 94% discount from its all-time high of $16.61 in December 2017. While it’s been volatile since then, it reached $4.02 per token in April 2021. This suggests that it has a level of price resilience and endurance within the market. Additionally, its current market cap is only $67 million, which could easily accommodate a price multiplier in the hundreds. Given its past runups, it could easily have another flight if the conditions are right.

This discussion is not financial advice and investors should always do their own research before investing. However, when you are looking for the next big winner in the “meme coin” segment, you might want to skip Shiba Inu. Its incredible past success from a market cap perspective will simply not enable it to come close to a repeat performance.