Dog Coin? Frog Coin? Inside a $50 Billion Crypto Joke

Memecoins are a type of cryptocurrency that originated from internet memes or jokes. Unlike other well-known cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ether, which were created with specific financial goals or technological designs, memecoins often start as jokes or social experiments. Some of the most speculative cryptocurrencies introduced in the last few years are trading at record highs, making the jokes expensive ones: The total market value of all memecoins is more than $50 billion.

At the center of every memecoin is a joke or a famous internet meme. For the original memecoin, Dogecoin, it’s a picture of a Shiba Inu dog. For newcomers dogwifhat and Pepe, it’s quite literally a dog wearing a hat and a green anthropomorphic frog, respectively. The technology behind each memecoin varies. Dogecoin, for example, is an open source peer-to-peer digital currency built on top of its own “blockchain,” which is a public ledger of ownership and transaction activity. Other memecoins are built on popular blockchains like Ethereum or Solana. For unknown reasons, dogs have always been the most popular choice of themes for memecoin creators, who are usually anonymous crypto developers.