Meme Coins: Dogecoin, Shiba Inu and the Rest
A meme coin is a crypto token built around an internet joke, character or trend, with a price set by attention and trading rather than by any income or use. The SEC's corporate finance staff compared them to collectibles in February 2025 and said their buyers get no protection from federal securities law.
A meme coin is a crypto token built around an internet joke, character or trend, priced by attention and trading rather than by income or use. Dogecoin is the largest, followed by Shiba Inu, with Pepe and many smaller tokens behind them.
Almost all of them now trade far below the prices they once reached, and the figures below show how far.
How it works
A meme coin starts as a token with a theme and a supply. Someone creates it on a blockchain, gives it a name and a picture people already share, and lists it where others can trade it. Launch sites exist to make this quick, and many of the newer tokens run on Solana, which CoinGecko tracks as its own meme sub-category.
Nothing inside the token produces money. A share of a company is a claim on its profits and a bond pays interest, but a meme coin pays nothing and owns nothing. The only way a holder makes money is to sell to someone else at a higher price, so the price is set by how many people want in and how fast.
That makes attention the fuel. A post from a famous account, a trending picture or a new listing on a large exchange can bring a wave of buyers in hours. When attention moves on, buying stops, and no dividend, buyback or earnings report exists to put a floor under the price.
It resembles a meme stock in one way and differs in another. Both are priced by a crowd’s attention. A meme stock still has a company behind it, with assets and audited accounts that can be valued once the excitement fades. A meme coin has no such fallback.
What the SEC said in February 2025
On 27 Feb 2025 the SEC’s Division of Corporation Finance published a staff statement on meme coins. It describes a meme coin as a crypto asset “inspired by internet memes, characters, current events, or trends,” typically bought for entertainment, social and cultural reasons, and says such coins “are akin to collectibles” with “limited or no use or functionality.”
Its conclusion is that selling a typical meme coin is not a securities offering. Nobody has to register the sale with the SEC. The statement spells out what that means for a buyer: “neither meme coin purchasers nor holders are protected by the federal securities laws.”
Two limits are written into it. It covers only coins that fit its description, not a product given a meme label to dodge the rules, and fraud around a meme coin can still be pursued by other federal or state agencies. It is also a staff view, which the statement itself says has no legal force or effect. The page was read on 26 Sep 2026.
Why the price moves so far
The supply that trades is often small next to the attention it gets. When thousands of new buyers arrive at once and few holders want to sell, each purchase has to reach higher up the order book to fill. The same thin market works in reverse on the way out.
Dogecoin’s biggest single day shows the scale. Its daily close went from $0.007482 on 27 Jan 2021 to $0.034084 on 28 Jan 2021 in Yahoo Finance’s record, a rise of 355.5% in one day, with no change in what the coin was or did.
Later runs were larger still. From $0.004682 at the end of 2020 it reached its highest daily close, $0.6848, on 7 May 2021, 146.3 times its year-end price in about four months. By 25 Sep 2026 it closed at $0.0989, 85.6% below that close.
A worked example
Start with the size of a normal day. Over the five years to 25 Sep 2026, Dogecoin’s daily change had a standard deviation of 4.70% and bitcoin’s 2.70%, from the same Yahoo Finance record. On $1,000, a typical day’s swing is about $27.00 in bitcoin and $47.00 in Dogecoin.
Now match the swing instead of the dollars. To take the same typical daily swing as $1,000 of bitcoin, the Dogecoin position is $1,000 x 2.70 / 4.70 = $574. That is the logic of position sizing by volatility: the more a coin moves, the less of it you hold for the same risk.
Then see what a peak buy costs. $1,000 spent at the record close of $0.6848 on 7 May 2021 bought about 1,460.3 coins. At the 25 Sep 2026 close of $0.0989 they were worth $144.50. Getting back to $1,000 from there needs a rise of 592%, which is the arithmetic of any deep drawdown: an 85.6% fall leaves 14.4% of the money, and 100 / 14.4 is about 6.9 times.
The same arithmetic is harsher for newer coins. CoinGecko put the Official Trump token at $2.14 on 26 Sep 2026, 97.1% below its record of $73.43 on 19 Jan 2025. A holder from that day would need a gain of 3,331% to break even.
The original data
CoinGecko’s meme category was worth $36.65 billion when it was read on 26 Sep 2026, 1.27% of the $2.90 trillion it counted across all crypto. Dogecoin made up 41.6% of the category and the five largest tokens 69.5%. Six meme tokens ranked in CoinGecko’s top 100 by market value: Dogecoin, Shiba Inu, MemeCore, Pump.fun, Pepe and Pudgy Penguins.
Of the 250 largest tokens in the category, 119 were 90% or more below their record high, and 15 of them 99% or more below. That leaves 104 between 90% and 99% below. The median token was 88.2% under its peak, and only 34 were less than 50% below it. Every token’s figures are in a CSV of the 250 meme tokens.
Most of those record highs are recent. 233 of the 250 were set in 2024, 2025 or 2026, so most of these tokens peaked within the last three years and have fallen since. Dogecoin and Shiba Inu are the exceptions, with records from May and October 2021.
The daily swings compare badly with bitcoin’s. In the five years to 25 Sep 2026, Dogecoin’s close moved 10% or more from the day before on 79 of 1,826 days, 4.3%, and bitcoin’s on 15, 0.8%. In the last 12 months the counts were 11 of 365 days for Dogecoin, 3.0%, and 2 of 365 for bitcoin, 0.5%. The daily closes are in a CSV of Dogecoin and bitcoin prices, and the counts in a CSV of large-move days.
The channel’s own record shows where the audience’s attention goes. In the YouTube Studio lifetime export of 11 Aug 2026, 166 of the 498 videos listed name Dogecoin, Shiba Inu, Pepe, Bonk or another meme coin in the title. Together they had 10,547,735 views, 23.6% of the channel’s 44,711,646 lifetime views. Most were mixed-topic streams: 113 have “live” in the title, and 128 name bitcoin as well.
Other creators see the same pull. In the 24,971-video study this site runs, 34 titles name meme coins, from 16 channels, at a median of 27,181.5 views, about 2.5 times the median for the whole study.
When it fails
Buying the attention peak fails most often. The highest prices tend to arrive when a coin is most talked about, which is exactly when a new buyer hears of it. The 119 tokens at 90% or more below their record show how often that ends.
Treating a meme coin as an investment fails because nothing grows. There is no revenue to rise and no dividend to collect, so a long hold is a bet that attention will return, not that value will build.
Thin markets fail on the exit. A stop order in a small token can fill well below its level, because the buyers who were there on the way up are gone. The slippage page covers how that cost builds.
Assuming someone will step in fails too. The SEC statement says buyers of typical meme coins get no protection from federal securities law, so a rug pull, where the creators sell their supply and leave, may have no securities remedy at all.
And sizing by conviction fails. A position sized for bitcoin’s swings carries 1.7 times the typical daily move in Dogecoin, and far more in a newer token, before any bad news at all.
Related
The altcoins page measures Dogecoin and nine other large coins against bitcoin over one, three and five years. The meme stock page shows the same crowd-driven pricing on shares that still have a business underneath. How crypto trading differs covers the round-the-clock market these tokens trade in, and position sizing sets out the method the worked example uses.
Size a meme coin by how far it can move in a day, not by how much you want to own. Work out the daily swing you would accept on bitcoin, then hold only enough of the meme coin to give the same swing, and decide the exit before the order goes in.
— Michael Whitman
This page is educational, not financial advice. Test every idea on your own charts before risking money.