What is Meme Coin? Is a joke worth investing in?

Jokes and entertainment are one of the integral aspects of human life and culture. We humans dedicate part of our serious work to jokes to compensate for the bitterness of hard work. The internet world has its own jokes and memes are one of the important elements in internet culture. This joke element entered the digital currency world with projects in the form of a topic called Meme Coin.

Countless users in the world of digital currencies have gathered around meme coins and have formed communities of fans of sports teams for these currencies. Now the market value of meme coins is by no means negligible and this type of digital currency needs serious study.

Therefore, in this article we want to see what meme coin is and how this type of digital currency was formed. Also, we review the features of meme coins and the risks of investing in them and introduce some of the most popular ones in this field. If you also want to get acquainted with this fun spectrum in the pulsating world of crypto, stay with us until the end of this article.

What is memecoin?

The world of digital currencies has been formed and grown on the Internet; Therefore, digital currencies and the Internet interact. One of the effects of the internet on digital currencies is the influence of internet culture, including meme culture; The topic that was the introduction to the formation of meme coins. Before we talk about meme coins, it is good to get acquainted with meme first.

In 1979, Richard Dawkins, an English evolutionary biologist, coined the term “Meme” for the first time in his book The Selfish Gene. He needed a word that conveys the concept of “idea and culture transfer”. Dawkins first came up with the Greek word “Mimeme” meaning “imitation”. But he was looking for a shorter word that rhymes with the English word Gene; Finally he came up with the word meme.

In today’s Internet culture, memes refer to funny images, videos, and texts that users copy from each other on social networks and publish with slight changes. Their purpose in publishing these images is to convey their meaning with a joking tone and humorous interpretations. In other words, a meme is an online visual joke.

Memecoins are a branch of the big world of digital currencies, whose symbol is an internet meme centered on an animal or human character. Memecoins do not have much use except for entertainment and trading.

The role of memes in the digital currency community

The digital currency community loves memes, and with the invention of meme coins, it has used these memes in other ways than as a joke on social networks. One of the characteristics of meme coins is that they usually have a large community of users who support their growth. Like other digital currencies, meme coins are created on the blockchain platform.

Unlike Bitcoin and Ethereum, which have specific and targeted uses, many meme coins do not have much use. This issue has made the market of meme coins very volatile; So that many of these assets become several times more expensive overnight or suddenly lose a large part of their value and may even become worthless.

A few memecoins, such as Dogecoin, have their own blockchain. Most of them are created and distributed in the form of tokens on blockchains such as Ethereum. For example, Shiba Inu and Floki Inu are ERC-20 tokens on the Ethereum blockchain.

The CoinMarketCap website lists over a few hundred meme coins, most of which are either inactive or inactive. Dogecoin, Shiba Inu, Dogelon Mars and Baby Doge Coin are four memecoins that have significant market value and daily trading volume.

History of meme coin

The first coin meme to emerge was Dogecoin, which after its release in 2013, a large community of digital currency users became fans of it. Dogecoin is now one of the top 10 digital currencies in the market with a market value of about 11.6 billion dollars. This success of Dogecoin caused a wave of memecoins to enter the market.

In 2013, two software engineers named Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer created Dogecoin just for the fun of Bitcoin fans. One of the popular meme characters among cryptocurrency users was a dog named Kabosu from the Japanese Shiba Inu breed, also known as Doge. Marcus and Palmer used this dog meme as the logo of this digital currency. They named this new currency Dog Coin, which was a mispronunciation of the word “Dog”.

Dogecoin quickly gained many fans on social networks. The strange and interesting thing that happened was that only two weeks after the release of Dogecoin, China banned payment companies from interacting with Bitcoin exchanges. This action of the Chinese government caused the fall of Bitcoin and other digital currencies; But the value of Dogecoin surprisingly grew by 300%.

The price of memecoins is heavily influenced by public culture and social networks. The growth of Dogecoin showed that the price fluctuations of memecoins have little correlation with the price changes in the digital currency market as a whole. Another astonishing record that Dogecoin set is related to its trading volume. Gemini digital currency exchange data shows that a month after the release of Dogecoin, its trading volume exceeded the combined trading volume of all other digital currencies.

Dogecoin; The first and most popular coin meme

Dogecoin has its own independent blockchain and uses the Proof of Work consensus algorithm that allows users to mine it. It is worth mentioning that in 2014, many miners stopped mining Dogecoin due to the drop in its price, and this issue worried the developers. For this reason, in 2015 Dogecoin mining was merged with Litecoin (LTC). Now Litecoin miners can mine Dogecoin at the same time.

Dogecoin does not have a supply cap, and this has caused its price to be highly exposed to the risk of inflation and extreme volatility. Therefore, investors usually do not use this digital currency for long-term investment. One of the uses of Dogecoin is to reward for creating online content and using it for charity. This use of Dogecoin has become one of the important factors in the popularity of this digital currency.

Video: What is Dogecoin?

In 2014, Dogecoin users raised $25,000 in Dogecoin in a campaign to send the Jamaican luge team to the Olympics. In the same year, in a campaign called Doge4Water, they raised $30,000 to provide access to drinking water in the country. Kenya collected

Some important events in the history of Dogecoin are tied to the name of Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX; The events that have created great commotion and controversy in the digital currency community. Musk supported Dogecoin at different times; So that in 2021, the price of this currency grew by 4,000%. Of course, it seems that these supports will continue.

Other popular memecoins

Dogecoin is still the source of inspiration for many memecoins. Every day we see new currencies entering the market imitating the name of Dodge; Although many of them fail from the beginning. As we said, there are more than 300 memecoins in the cryptocurrency market, many of which are imitations of Dogecoin.

Another famous meme coin Shiba Ino It was launched in 2020 and called itself Dogecoin Killer. This currency takes its symbol and name from the Shiba Inu dog of Dogecoin. Shiba Ino also experienced astronomical growth and in October 2021, its market value reached 43 billion dollars and was equal to Dogecoin. Shiba Ino is also an ERC-20 token on the Ethereum blockchain.

Read more: What is Shiba Inu? Learning to buy and invest + wallets

Another meme coin similar to Dogecoin is DogElon Mars (ELON), which was launched in April 2021. Dog Elon Mars is also an ERC-20 token on the Ethereum blockchain and uses the image of a dog as its symbol. The developers of this token have published many comic stories with its dog character on the memecon website.

It is interesting to know that Doj Ilan Mars Twitter account has more than 500 thousand followers. The market value of this meme coin at the time of writing this article is 149 million dollars. Baby Dogecoin with the symbol BabyDoge, as the name suggests, is inspired by Dogecoin in everything. The Baby Dog Coin fan community says that this digital currency was created to help pets.

Data from the official website of BabyDog indicates that more than 1.6 million addresses are holders of BabyDogCoin.

Features of MemeCoin

One of the common features of meme coins, which we also mentioned about Dogecoin, is that their supply limit is usually very high or unlimited. A digital currency like Bitcoin is programmed in such a way that only 21 million units will be released. This is despite the fact that meme coins often release billions of token units and do not have a limit to release more units in the future. Also, memecoins generally do not have a program to burn tokens to keep them out of circulation and control supply inflation.

High or unlimited supply makes the price of memecoins per unit very low. At the same time, this low price paves the way for small investors with very small capitals and allows millions of people to easily buy large amounts of these digital currencies. Since meme coins are just for fun and there is no need to have a complex technical idea behind them, anyone can create a meme coin with their favorite theme and meme and publish it; Especially since token creation has become very easy thanks to existing software.

Another feature of meme coins is their price fluctuation. The price of these digital currencies is highly dependent on the activities of the fan community and the discussions and rumors that are going on in the communities. For this reason, the sudden rise and fall of their prices is not a strange issue.

Risks of investing in MemeCoin

We said that memecoins are highly dependent on the sentiment of the fan community and the occasional influence of factors outside of the digital currency sphere, such as tweets by celebrities and famous personalities. This dependence makes the price of memecoins highly volatile. Therefore, the price of MemeCoin may suddenly skyrocket or fall.
After all, sometimes people have created meme coins for fraud and after the sale of tokens, there is no more news about the creators. In one example, people took advantage of the popularity of the Korean series “Squid Game” to create a meme of the same name. The price of this meme coin reached 2,000 dollars in the early days. The creators of Squid Game digital currency sold their tokens at the peak of the price and disappeared.

Many memecoins do not have an independent blockchain and powerful technology and even an established ecosystem behind them, and even many of them are created by copying the code of other digital currencies. Among the existing meme coins, only Dogecoin has its own independent blockchain, and of course its security is dependent on Litecoin.

Also, memecoins have a weak developer community, which makes them unable to always be up-to-date in terms of security and technology. For example, the development of Dogecoin came to a complete standstill at several points and there was no one to support it technically. Also, in most memecoins, a small group owns the largest share of the supply and can easily manipulate the market.

From a practical point of view, most memecoins have no value outside of the digital currency world. For example, there are very few memecoins that are accepted as a payment method for purchasing goods and services. Also, the nature of memecoins is such that their presence is temporary and it is unlikely that there will be many of these in the coming years or that their value will go much higher.

Advantages and disadvantages of meme coins

Where can we buy coins?

Memecoins can be bought from both centralized and decentralized exchanges. Famous meme coins, which have a large volume of transactions, are bought and sold in most major exchanges; But those memecoins that are newly launched may not be listed on centralized exchanges. These meme coins can be obtained from decentralized exchanges.

For Iranian users, the easiest way is to go to the website of one of the Iranian digital currency exchanges and buy the meme coin they want. Iranian users usually use one of the following two methods to buy digital currencies:

1. Direct purchase from Iranian digital currency exchanges with Rial and bank card

2. Buying Tether or Bitcoin from Iranian exchanges and converting it to the desired meme coin in foreign exchanges

Direct purchase from the Iranian exchange

To buy from Iranian exchanges, just search the phrase “Iranian digital currency exchanges” or the name of the meme coin you want next to the phrase “Iranian exchange” in Google; For example, “Buy BabyDoge from an Iranian exchange”. By doing this, you will come across a list of Iranian exchanges where you can easily buy the desired digital currency using your bank card after registering and authenticating your identity.

Buying from a foreign exchange

If for any reason you want to buy memecoin from foreign exchanges, you should first know that it is not possible to buy directly from foreign exchanges for Iranian users. The best thing is to buy some bitcoins or dai or usdc and then convert it to mimecoin of your choice in your account in one of the foreign exchanges.

To find out which exchanges your favorite meme coin is listed on, you can go to its page on the CoinMarketCap website and see all the centralized and decentralized exchanges that have it in the Markets section.

It is also necessary to remember that many centralized exchanges do not provide services to Iranian users citing existing sanctions; Especially exchanges that require authentication expose Iranian users to many risks.

The most famous meme coins of 2022

Discussion and hype about meme coins became very intense among social networks from the beginning of 2021. At that time, celebrities such as Elon Musk and Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks and Snoop Dogg, the famous hip-hop artist, created a lot of excitement for Dogecoin.

Read more: the biggest celebrities active in the field of digital currency; From Snoop Dogg to Elon Musk

All this time, Dogecoin has remained the most popular and valuable meme coin in the market, and Musk has talked about it from time to time and even promised to take Dogecoin to Mars. Besides Dogecoin, other meme coins have always been the favorite of meme coin fans. In the image below, we list the most popular meme coins of 2022.

Functional meme coins

One of the big weaknesses of meme coins, with the exception of Dogecoin, which is accepted as a payment method in some stores, is that they have no use except for entertainment and speculation. However, a trend for meme coins with serious applications is forming, which can be considered a new wave in the history of this genre of digital currencies.

FLOKI, which is named after Elon Musk’s dog and ironically is a Shiba Inu breed, has defined uses beyond entertainment. This meme coin has a kind of metaverse game and a unique token store and digital currency education platform. Emergence of the Queenie-like meme Floki Ino It could usher in a new era in memecoins that combines the popularity and notoriety of meme culture with the serious benefits of the cryptocurrency world.

Conclusion

In this article, we examined meme coins and the history of the creation of this type of digital currency. We also talked about the creation of DodgeCoin as the world’s first memecoin and introduced some of the other popular memecoins that emerged after the success of Dodge. Next, we listed the features of meme coins and the risks of investing in this type of digital currency and their advantages and disadvantages, and in the end, we introduced the most popular meme coins of 2022 and a new type of meme coins that have applications beyond entertainment.

Although the price of memecoins skyrocketed in 2021, most of them lost a large part of their value as the cryptocurrency market slumped in 2022. However, this does not mean that memecoins do not have a future. Currently, it seems unlikely that memecoins will have the same widespread adoption as Bitcoin and Ethereum; But with this introduction, it cannot be argued that the meme coin species will become extinct.

The factor that hinders the general acceptance of meme coins is the same factor that affects other digital currencies and it is nothing but the unfamiliarity of most people with digital currency technology. Fortunately, public awareness about digital currencies is growing, and if nothing untoward happens, this awareness will increase and lead to the expansion of the adoption of this currency.