Meme Coin Phenomenon: The Other Side of the Crypto Industry

Memes are familiar to almost everyone on the internet today, even if the word itself isn’t. The same goes for meme coins: anyone with even a passing interest in crypto, even as a casual observer, has heard of them. The reason is simple. Meme coins naturally embody all the stereotypically negative traits of cryptocurrencies, yet they flip those traits into advantages and, in the process, push the industry forward. So what exactly explains the phenomenon of meme coins?

So, What Exactly Is a Meme?

Today, the word “meme” is most often associated with viral internet content — catchphrases and visual gags. In academic terms, however, a meme is any persistent unit of cultural information. That includes proverbs, rituals, melodies, fashion styles, ideological frameworks, and much more. In other words, a meme isn’t just a joke. It’s a far broader phenomenon. Internet memes are simply one subset, defined by their digital environment and by an accelerated cycle of creation, spread, mutation, and decline.

From a scientific perspective, a meme is a cultural replicator. It survives and spreads through the copying, transmission, and reproduction of information from one person to another. Its natural habitat is the human mind and the channels of communication — books, films, music, and the digital space that now unites all forms of information, from text to audiovisual media. 

Memes share 3 core traits that make them comparable to genes:

1. Inheritance. A meme can be passed on to another person in a relatively unchanged form.
2. Variation. As it spreads, it can shift slightly, taking on new shapes.
3. Selection. Some memes survive and spread further, while others fade if they lose relevance.

The study of memes as units of cultural evolution gave rise to an interdisciplinary field known as memetics. It examines how ideas take hold in society, why some cultural images go mainstream, and why others vanish. Memetics combines approaches from biology, psychology, sociology, and cognitive science.

In today’s world, memes have become a central tool of communication, shaping social practices, worldviews, patterns of behavior, and interaction. The scale of the phenomenon is clear from a 2024 review published by Emerald, which cites 128 works as key contributions to the theory of memetics.

Memetics provides the theoretical foundation for many applied fields, including social engineering, advertising and marketing, political strategy, propaganda, journalism, education, cultural studies, and countless other areas tied to the circulation of ideas, influence over collective consciousness, and the management of cultural processes. In short, memes matter most where information and symbolic impact are the core resources, and where the outcome is a shift in perception, behavior, and social dynamics.

So how does this connect to crypto?  

The Role of Memes in the Crypto Industry

What is cryptocurrency? Most readers wouldn’t be able to offer a precise definition, if one even exists, but they’d try to describe it through familiar images and concepts. Today, that’s much easier than it was in 2009, since the vast majority of people worldwide have at least heard of cryptocurrencies.

What’s notable is that Bitcoin first gained traction not as a financial tool but as a cultural phenomenon, essentially a meme in the academic sense of the word. Users shared news of a new form of electronic money, debated cryptography and the novel idea of decentralization, and compared it to the utopian visions of cypherpunks or even to science fiction. What drew attention wasn’t practical utility. It was the sheer strangeness and symbolism of the idea.

Memetic dynamics helped Bitcoin break out of its narrow circle of enthusiasts:

1. Virality. Digital money that couldn’t be tracked, could be mined on a home computer, and was created by an anonymous genius who then disappeared — this story took on a life of its own. It spread virally, wrapped in myths, sparking both skepticism and fascination.
2. Simple symbols. The Bitcoin logo, comparisons to “digital gold,” and images of “freedom from banks” fit neatly into cultural templates and spread like memes.
3. Opposition to the system. Bitcoin became a protest symbol against the traditional financial order, and protest symbols always carry strong memetic power. 

The idea of cryptocurrencies proved resilient, and Bitcoin itself evolved into a meme, becoming the locomotive of the crypto market. After all, what’s one of the defining qualities of a meme? Once it emerges in human society, it creates a self-replicating system sustained and developed by enthusiasts. Thanks to that community, Bitcoin’s market cap nearly hit $850 billion just nine years after its launch. Another seven years later, BTC was already attracting global institutional investors, with peak capitalization reaching about $2.5 trillion.

The Meme Is Gone, Yet the Meme Lives On

Think back to two core traits of a meme: variation and inheritance. When it comes to internet memes, short life spans also come to mind. The first meme coin appeared well before Bitcoin evolved from a meme into a serious investment asset. Still, by 2013, a pair of programmer enthusiasts had already grown bored with the original cryptocurrency and launched Dogecoin. It was meant as a tongue-in-cheek parody of Bitcoin. At the semiotic level, the project borrowed both its name and imagery from Doge, a viral internet meme of the time.

From a technical standpoint, Dogecoin was little more than Bitcoin’s distant cousin. For years, it was known only to a small group of Reddit users and rarely spread beyond the platform. Everything changed in 2020, when Elon Musk suddenly began mentioning DOGE. His comments coincided with a broader crypto market rally. By May 2021, the coin’s market cap had nearly hit 90 billion dollars, only to collapse soon after. Yet the episode set a trend, and meme coins began sprouting like mushrooms after rain. 

Meme Coin Mania in Its Purest Form 

Of course, a few one-off projects had popped up earlier, created, as they say, just for fun. But the story of Dogecoin changed the concept itself. Meme coins moved from being inside jokes for a niche crowd to becoming the most speculative sector of the crypto market. That’s why this article’s headline refers to them as the “other side of the crypto industry.”

What are the most common stereotypes about cryptocurrencies? The list usually looks like this:

• Extreme volatility
• Purely speculative value
• Rampant fraud 

Meme coins brought all these traits together. Volatility turned into a selling point, speculation became the core motive, and fraud was widely tolerated as part of the game. These features shaped the rules of the meme coin market.

How does it work? The formula is simple. The rare traders who manage to profit from meme coins are seasoned speculators chasing the biggest possible gain in the shortest possible time. For them, volatility and fraud are close allies, since Pump-and-Dump schemes remain the basic playbook for most meme coins today. 

Even so, the meme coin market didn’t just expand but carved out its own niches. In the past, meme coin traders mostly gathered on general-purpose decentralized exchanges. By 2024, however, a new star emerged: Pump.fun. The platform quickly spawned imitators. The premise was simple: make it as easy as possible to create meme coins and build a marketplace focused solely on trading them. Analysts estimate that more than 10,000 new tokens could be launched on Pump.fun in a single day, yet only 1 out of 5 traders managed to avoid losses. 

Despite those odds, the lure of quick profit has continued to attract investors, both retail and institutional. Franklin Templeton, for example, published a client note acknowledging that meme coins can generate fast returns even when they serve no practical purpose.

To be fair, the largest meme coins have evolved into more substantial crypto projects. Dogecoin, for instance, is alive and well as a full-fledged blockchain ecosystem, with DOGE widely used as a payment method. Floki offers another example. Launched as a meme coin, it eventually grew into a complete ecosystem and, in December 2024, rolled out a crypto debit card on the Mastercard network, now available across nearly all European countries. Shiba Inu, Pepe, and Bonk started as meme coins as well, yet they managed to build active communities and transform into meaningful projects that continue to shape the broader crypto industry.