Meme Coins in the Spotlight: What’s New With DOGE, SHIB, and FLOKI?

The cryptocurrency market is mixed with green and red on Wednesday as Bitcoin maintains its position above $30k but drops a bit from its highest level in a year. It’s been about two weeks now that the largest cryptocurrency has been trading in the $30k – $31.5k range, and if it breaks the higher end of the range, we could see a 14-month high again.

At the time of writing, BTC/USD was trading at $30,398 while ETH/USD was exchanging hands at $1,910, according to CoinGecko. In the past 24 hours, the trading volume of Bitcoin and Ether has fallen by 33.8% and 9.40% to $10.12 bln and $6.95 bln, respectively.

Meanwhile, the total crypto market cap stands at $1.23 trillion as DeFi tokens like Uniswap, Aave, Compound, and Maker rally. This last week, old coins like Bitcoin Cash and Litecoin have also been soaring in value.

The euphoria surrounding the application for a sport Bitcoin ETF has fueled optimism and interest in the cryptocurrency market. And with these latest gains, the total volume of the crypto sector surged past $37.5 billion.

With institutional interest in Bitcoin at full force taking its dominance to its highest since April 2021 at nearly 50% and the biggest event halving fast approaching in April 2024, the crypto king could further extend its gains. A continued Bitcoin recovery will then have crypto enthusiasts seeking higher risk that will push altcoins higher. But this can take its sweet time.

On the macro front, the Federal Reserve will release its June meeting minutes on Wednesday, where it decided to leave interest rates unchanged between 5% and 5.25%. The central bank’s next meeting on rates is later this month on July 26, with the market expecting a 25-basis-point rate increase.

A Look at Meme Coins Market

Meme coins are the most popular category in the crypto sector, which enjoys a much larger mainstream adoption than any other except for the majors; Bitcoin and Ether. This market saw exponential growth in 2021, especially the dog-themed meme coins.

But what are they exactly? Meme coins are meme-inspired cryptocurrencies that tend to be highly volatile, with their prices influenced by social media and online community sentiments.

Meme coins aren’t limited to just the crypto sector, though. In late 2020, the traditional stock market saw the “meme stock” saga of GameStop (GME) and AMC Entertainment (AMC), where the Reddit community pumped up the prices of these shares to as much as 100 times in a few months.

In the crypto space, Dogecoin, Shiba Inu, Pepe, FLOKI, Baby Doge Coin, and Dogelon Mars are some of the most popular meme coins. And unlike cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum, which are utility currencies with specific features, meme coins offer no additional value beyond trading and are largely driven by market sentiments.

While the decentralized finance (DeFi) and non-fungible token (NFT) market has been seeing a lot of volatility, the meme coin sector has been rejoicing. Such is the craze for mem coins that even amidst the bear market, a new project quickly gained traction and joined among the top 100 cryptos in a very short period of time.

But PEPE is just a new addition to the meme sector, which has grown to have a $16 billion market cap while managing $736.3 mln in trading volume. Interestingly, the original meme coin, Doge, accounts for 60.37% of the entire meme coin market cap, followed by SHIB at 28.3%. Together, these two meme coins dominate 88.67% of the market capitalization. So, let’s see how these coins are performing in the recovering crypto market.

Dogecoin (DOGE)

DOGE is the 9th largest cryptocurrency, with a market cap of $9.33 billion. The biggest meme coin is currently trading at $0.0665. As DOGE went down by 2.8% against USD and 0.5% against BTC in the past 24 hours, its trading volume increased by 91.50% during this period to signal a rise in market activity.

Unlike other crypto assets, 2023 hasn’t really been good for this meme coin as it is down by 2.37% in 2023 so far and only up by 0.3% in the past year.

Dogecoin was created in 2013 as a joke cryptocurrency by software engineers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer, who drew inspiration from the meme of a Shiba Inu dog. Designed not to have any real-world utility beyond being a simple blockchain-based payment system, DOGE has amassed a diehard community of fans.

In 2015, both the founders stepped away from Dogecoin, calling the community “toxic,” with Marcus recently saying that the market has been marked by “rampant greed.” The project was left in the hands of volunteer developers from the community.

At the time of its launch, Dogecoin founders didn’t have a public sale or “premine” coins, and rather, out of the total supply limit of 100 billion coins, anyone could begin mining it immediately.

The coin was a fork of Litecoin, as such, it adopts the same Proof of Work (POW) mechanism and has no maximum supply. However, its black rewards were completely random, and until 2014, the range of coin available block rewards was reduced every 100,000 blocks. After that, the block reward system was changed to a fixed schedule, and miners could receive 10,000 DOGE per block. This means 5.2 billion DOGE are mined each year. Currently, over 140 billion DOGE are in circulation.

While known for its impressive rally, DOGE’s first price pump was 1,060% over a two-week period right after it went live. Then in March 2017, during the early stages of the bull market, its price rose by 1,494% to $0.004 only to fall back down to $0.001 before it had yet another burst of euphoria that sent it to its then peak of $0.18.

Now, during the bull market of 2021, DOGE went on to hit a new all-time high at $0.73 and, since then, has lost 90.58% of its value. This rally was influenced by Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s support, who is now facing a class action lawsuit by investors who believe he deliberately manipulated the market.

Dogecoin also grapples with the issue of concentrated ownership, with nine wallets collectively holding more than 40% of all DOGE, with one wallet holding 28%, as per the data from IntoTheBlock.

Click here to learn all about investing in Dogecoin (DOGE).

Shiba Inu (SHIB)

This DOGE rival, Shiba Inu, is also named after a Japanese dog breed. It was created in August 2020 by an anonymous developer named Ryoshi. Unlike DOGE, which has an unlimited supply, SHIB started off with a limited supply of 1 quadrillion tokens, of which 50% were burnt and donated to charity by Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin.

What happened was Shiba Inu’s creators sent half of the token supply to Buterin after issuance, who permanently destroyed 90% of the held amount at the time – and donated the remaining tokens. Earlier last month, Ethereum co-creator Vitalik Buterin added $10 million more to the India-focused covid prevention initiative CryptoRelief, which will add $90 million in USDC to the donation. All of these funds were generated from the sales of SHIB tokens.

SHIB is the 17th largest cryptocurrency, with a market cap of $4.55 billion. Trading at $0.00000765, the coin is down 3% in the past 24 hours while its trading volume jumped 19% to $134 million.

The meme coin was one of the most volatile cryptos of 2021 when its price went from $0.00000172 to $0.00003532, soaring 1,953%, only to plunge to $0.00000793 in a matter of three weeks. During the month of Oct., the SHIB price again rallied to its ATH of $0.00008616 but has since lost 91% of its value.

In 2023, much like DOGE, SHIB has been struggling with its price down by 7.73% year-to-date (YTD). Up until early Feb., SHIB did go up by almost 82%, but it has been on a downtrend ever since.

However, SHIB aims to be more than just a meme coin and has an ecosystem including a decentralized exchange (DEX), an NFT collection, an NFT art incubator, and an NFT game. The ecosystem also has three separate tokens; SHIB, BONE, and LEASH, that users can swap, deposit, or stake to earn interest and rewards.

Moreover, the Shiba Inu community is also working on its layer 2 network Shibarium. The network’s native test network, Puppynet, crossed 25 million transactions last week from 17 million wallets ahead of its mainnet release planned in the coming months. Each transaction on the network will also burn a certain amount of SHIB tokens.

Besides being used as a cheap settlement for dApps built on the network, Shiba Inu developers have previously said Shibarium would also focus on metaverse and gaming applications. A virtual land metaverse based on Shibarium is actually planned for a partial release later this year that will allow users to create their own avatars, interact with lands, and contribute to the in-game economy.

Click here to learn all about investing in Shiba Inu (SHIB).

Floki Inu (FLOKI)

While DOGE and SHIB have been struggling this year, FLOKI managed to record a 230% increase in value YTD. The meme coin also surged by almost 315% over the past year while being down by 92% from its $0.0003365 peak in Nov. 2021. Trading at $0.00002560, FLOKI is currently in the red by 6.7% while its trading volume drops by 33.3% to $13 million.

This meme coin originated in June 2021 when Musk tweeted that he would be naming his pet Shiba Inu “Floki.” Over time, Floki has gained significant popularity as a meme-based cryptocurrency which, much like SHIB, has evolved to become a fully-fledged web3 project spanning DeFi, NFTs, and the Metaverse.

FLOKI is both ERC-20 and BEP-20 compliant, and while the token has a 3% tax imposed on buying and selling it, the tax is not applicable to transfer between the two chains. According to its white paper, the team will reduce the tax once the treasury has accumulated enough funds. However, no specific target has been given.

Earlier this year, the community voted to burn 4.2 trillion FLOKI tokens on a cross-chain bridge and reduce the transactional tax to 0.3%. Then in Feb., Floki was made available to be used as collateral to borrow a basket of crypto on Venus Protocol, the second-largest lending platform on the BNB Chain.

To build utility, the team behind Floki introduced its own NFT game, Valhalla, where players can earn rewards based on participation. The token serves as the in-game currency and can be used to purchase assets. Late in May, the game made a China-focused push to attract more users for Valhalla with the Floki game featuring in some Chinese sporting tournaments.

In its attempt to grow beyond a meme coin, the project also teamed up with the Million Gardens Movement, a gardening campaign founded by Musk’s brother, Kimbal Musk. Floki’s other products involve FlokiFi, which focuses on DeFi, FlokiPlaces is a marketplace for NFTs and merchandise, and the Floki University Crypto Education Platform works on increasing awareness of crypto and the Floki Inu ecosystem.

Click here to learn all about investing in Floki Inu (FLOKI).

Final Note

Overall, meme coins are thriving and continue to build. While they are struggling a bit this year, it is to be expected as meme coins pump the hardest in a bull market and dump just as dramatically during bear markets. When the tide shifts in the broad crypto market with confidence, these coins can be expected to shine yet again, but of course, not every crypto, meme coin, or other will make it to the next bull market, so always do your research before investing in any digital asset!