Memecoins reach $100 billion market value for the first time in history

Anyone who thought around 2020/2021 that fun tokens like SHIBA INU, Dogecoin, and the like were a flash in the pan is now being proven wrong. Because so-called memecoins are currently experiencing a second spring. After Bitcoin soared to new heights towards $90,000 following the Trump election, altcoins also shot up – and with them the memecoins.

Memecoins are crypto assets without any real functionality that are mainly based on an internet meme, a joke or an online community – technically they mostly run on blockchains like Ethereum or Solana and are therefore not very exciting. But because they are part of internet culture and can also be traded on many crypto exchanges, they are still very popular.

This is also the case these days. Overall, the market capitalization of memecoins has grown to more than 100 billion dollars for the first time in the history of cryptocurrencies – thus they play a small but growing role within the crypto universe, which is now around 2.9 trillion dollars in size.

Dogecoin is growing, but GOAT, NEIRO, and SHIB are growing faster

What is surprising is that it is not the forefather of memecoins, Dogecoin, that is breaking the records, but other tokens. DOGE may be the largest memecoin in terms of market capitalization (the tokens are currently worth around $53 billion in total), but in terms of growth, there are other tokens that grew much more steeply in different phases of the crypto market.

If you look at the past 30 days, it is actually the memecoin GOAT that has overshadowed even the Dogecoin driven by Elon Musk. GOAT has been on an insane growth trajectory since mid-October and has increased by more than 700 percent within the past 30 days. The joke about GOAT: There are only 999 of them on the Binance Smart Chain – this is how artificial scarcity was created.

If you look at the performance of the memecoins on an annual basis, two completely different crypto assets stand out: Firstly, there is NEIRO, which wanted to build on the success of Dogecoin and SHIBA INU and finally did so. NEIRO, a really quite simple ERC-20 token on Ethereum, is marketed as the “sister of DOGE”, and quite successful. Since its launch in August 2024, NEIRO has grown by an incredible 56,600 percent – apparently the marketing in the pump groups worked well.

The most successful memecoin of all time is neither NEIRO nor GOAT, but SHIBA INU. The growth rates after the launch in 2021 were spectacular, and the slump came quickly again. Nevertheless, it must be noted that SHIB was able to recover significantly in 2024. The fun token is currently one of the 11 largest cryptocurrencies, with a market capitalization of around 15 billion dollars.

Memecoins have no real use at all; they can be seen more as digital trading cards for fans of an online community who enjoy driving up prices. Such tokens are usually very volatile and quickly disappear into obscurity. However, for dApp platforms like Solana that want to grow, such memecoins are important for distribution – which is why the creators are often courted to choose one blockchain or the other. There are even dedicated platforms like pump.fun that help create memecoins on the Solana blockchain quickly and easily.