Memes on parade
What's being bought and sold*
TOP TRENDING ASSETS
*Trading activity in the past 24 hours on the Uphold platform, as of 7 a.m. 27th May 2024.
The combined total of buy and sell percentages can exceed 100% due to customers who engage in both buying and selling the same asset within the 24-hour time frame.
Don’t invest in crypto unless you’re prepared to lose all the money you invest. This is a high-risk investment and you should not expect to be protected if something goes wrong.
What’s up
A Most Memorable Day For Memecoins
Bitcoin spent the long holiday weekend relaxing. Memecoins did no such thing.
Pepe (PEPE), run on Ethereum, created around a cartoon frog, earlier today leaped to a new all-time high of $0.00001717, according to CoinGecko. PEPE’s now the 21st-largest digital asset with a market capitalization of nearly $7 billion.
Another memecoin in the Ethereum ecosystem, cat-based Mog Coin (MOG), also just hit a fresh ATH of $0.000001619 on a 24-hour gain of 51%. Last summer, MOG had a price that contained eight zeros after the decimal, so, yeah, it’s come quite a long way.
MOG and PEPE seem to be riding a wave of Ethereum enthusiasm following the approval last week of key U.S. regulatory filings suggesting the coming launch of a series of spot ETH ETFs (CoinDesk).
Meanwhile, a Memorial Day parade of political memecoins, including MAGA Hat (MAGA) and MAGA (TRUMP), took off rallying after Donald Trump declared himself pro-crypto during a speech that the former U.S. president (and the presumed Republican nominee set to run in November) delivered to the Libertarian National Convention (Decrypt).
And in a sign that artificial intelligence may indeed be taking over, check out the rise of AI-infused memecoin Turbo, which hit a new ATH of $0.006759 just moments ago. TURBO now has a market cap that is approaching half-a-billion dollars. It sits among the Top 200 coins tracked by CoinGecko. In the past month, TURBO has rocketed more than 1,000%.
Memecoins, or "meme coins" (for those disinclined to conjoin two words), are a fascinating, mercurial, hugely volatile subset of the cryptosphere, where popularity ties to internet memes and viral marketing.
Typically, the assets start as a joke, without any claim to practical function, explained Crypto News in a recent round-up of anecdotes about various anonymous traders turning small memecoin bets into huge profits, while also strongly cautioning of considerable risks.
No one is saying the allure of getting in on the joke early isn’t tantalizing. Take for example, the first-ever meme token, Dogecoin, based on the popular Shiba Inu dog meme. It’s a portrait in unlikely juggernaut success.
DOGE launched in 2013 via source code from Litecoin, a fork of Bitcoin. In May of 2021, on hype fed mainly by Elon Musk, DOGE reached $0.68 after once being as low as $0.0000869. DOGE is now $0.16 per token. DOGE has a market cap in excess of $24 billion, making it CoinGecko's ninth-largest digital asset.
“In general, it is difficult to predict in the long term how the meme coin market will behave," Crypto News points out. "Because, in memes, everything depends so heavily on hype.”
What's down
Perilous Exploit Plays Out Peculiarly
In a bizarre incident emblematic of the murky, fraught world of memecoin speculation, an Ethereum-layer-2 token, Normie, suffered a smart contract exploit resulting in a flash loan that wildly inflated supply, causing the token to hemorrhage 99% of its market capitalization, from $40 million down to only about $1 million; however, and this is the weird part, the attacker proposed returning 90% of ill-gotten ETH proceeds – and the project's team accepted the offer, even promising no reprisals.
Normie was launched in March on Base, an Ethereum layer-2 scaling network, during a frenzied period that swept the Base network after the Dencun upgrade, which slashed fees for layer-2s. The project at one point boasted a market cap of $100 million (BeInCrypto).
Meanwhile, in another sketchy episode underscoring the dicey nature of the realm, several influencers had their X accounts hacked over the weekend, possibly part of an elaborately orchestrated attack, "shilling everything from Luna2 and ORDI to celebrity-inspired memecoins," Cointelegraph said.
“More niche celebs are popping up by the minute launching meme coins on a long weekend when platform engineers are away,” said Udi Wertheimer, a Bitcoin developer who urged his social media followers to proceed with caution.
What's next
Might Solana, XRP Get Their Own ETFs?
Solana's memecoin-creation platform pump.fun has opened up the floodgates for new digital assets teeming into existence from every direction like sand flies hatching in a muddy river.
Solana’s ecosystem is bustling with minting, borrowing, lending, buying and selling. One of the biggest of the Solana-bred memecoins, Bonk, has gained 55% since last Monday. The network’s native SOL is now the fifth-largest token following a rise of 22% in the past month.
Might the floodgates for SOL investments about to be opened up as well?
A researcher at Standard Chartered said Friday that Solana and XRP will be the next major coins to get the publicly traded fund treatment in the U.S.
“Markets will look ahead to their eventual ETF status," said Geoffrey Kendrick, head of crypto research at the British multinational bank.
Most likely, though, these events would not play out until next year, Kendrick added.
