Meme returns jarring

Yet another flare up of meme mania has crypto partying like it’s a month ago while a Big-Bang-like explosion of coins vie for attention. 

The 24-hour charts turned red to flat, but we’re seeing some gaudy weekly returns in a category often discarded, fairly or not, as fly-by-night risky.

Pepe (PEPE) has surged by nearly 40% in the past seven days. Dogwifhat (WIF) notched a 50% gain in that span.

And welcome to the Top 100, Popcat (POPCAT): since last Friday, the feline-themed meme has soared 75% to nearly 80 cents. POPCAT spent the first few weeks of 2024 trying to find relevance in a dog-meme-dominated world, and also to keep above the one-penny mark. In the past month, POPCAT is up nearly 200%.

CoinGecko estimates the meme category's total market capitalization has surpassed $50 billion as tokens such as Brett and Bonk and Turbo continue to enchant punters.

Not to be left out of the conversation is the OG memecoin, Dogecoin (DOGE). It's the tenth-largest digital asset with a market capitalization of $17 billion. On-chain metrics suggest the $0.12 level is overdue for a sustained breach. Although, it’s worth noting DOGE's weekly gain was a relatively underwhelming 12.6%.

"DOGE is for whales," said Altcoin Sherpa, forecasting a potential memecoin supercycle that'll present as a smorgasbord of mid- and small- and micro-cap coins that keep endlessly proliferating as if sprayed from a giant hose. Most of them languish unremarkably; many others take on lives of their own.

For example, a staggering 900% monthly gain for masculinity-meme Gigachad (GIGA) has now given it a $166M market cap, placing it within the ranks of the Top 300 coins as ranked by CoinGecko.

As for the next new thing, there's Poodlana, a poodle-as-fashion-accessory meme. Earlier this week, the project launched a month-long pre-sale of POODL coins available at a price that'll incrementally rise every few days from 2 cents to 5 cents. One hour after the pre-sale ends on Aug. 17, POODL will list on a Solana DEX (Cointelegraph).

A software update for Microsoft Windows from cybersecurity company CrowdStrike has led to system outages that have disrupted airlines, public transportation, banks, healthcare facilities and even some emergency services. CrowdStrike underscored this was a glitch, not a cyber attack, adding that the issue has been identified and a fix was in the works, as of 9 a.m. (EST).

Crypto's response was to launch a barrage of memecoins connected with Microsoft’s “Blue Screen of Death” connoting an operational error.

DEXScreener data reveals the emergence of tokens with names like bluescreenofdeath and BSoD as pumpers did their short-term-attention-span thing, never minding that most moment-spurred coins wind up worthless.

No crypto-related company or business had reported errors or outages in their services as of early Friday, according to CoinDesk.

A North Korea-linked hacking group yesterday drained more than $200 million from India's WazirX exchange. Roughly half of the haul was in the form of Shiba Inu (SHIB) tokens. Most of it has already been converted into Ethereum and a variety of altcoins, according to Lookonchain. 

The heist appears to have been well-planned out and preceded by a week's worth of practice runs, said Polygon’s IT security chief Mudit Gupta.

The trouble began when hackers upgraded a multisig wallet to a malicious version that would later allow them to drain it, Gupta explained in a post on X (Cointelegraph).

SHIB, 14th-largest digital asset and second-largest memecoin after DOGE, was in the green earlier today after a volatile 24 hours ranging between $0.00001695 and $0.00001777, per CoinGecko.

Bullish forces are helping SHIB ride out a storm of arbitrage trading as opportunists sought to extract a rupee-denominated discount, exacerbating sell pressure. However, SHIB whales appear to be on a shopping spree, CryptoPotato said.

Also on the rise are metrics associated with meme-status-transcendent Shibarium, the protocol’s Ethereum layer-two scaling solution.