A memecoin is a crypto token whose value rests on attention - community, humour and internet culture - rather than on a product, a revenue stream or a technical claim. Dogecoin, launched in 2013 as a joke, is the original; thousands have followed.
How they are made
Most memecoins are not separate blockchains. They are tokens issued on an existing chain such as Ethereum or Solana, using the same token standard any other project uses. Creating one costs very little and takes minutes, which is why so many exist: launchpad tools let anyone mint a token, seed a trading pool and list it without permission.
Supply is usually fixed at creation and often very large, so individual units trade at fractions of a cent. That is a formatting choice rather than a discount - what describes size is market capitalization, price multiplied by supply.
Why they behave differently
- No cash flows and no fundamental anchor. There is typically nothing to value in the usual sense, so attention is the variable being traded.
- Thin liquidity. Trading often concentrates in one or two pools, so both directions move quickly.
- Concentrated holdings. A small number of wallets frequently hold a large share of supply.
- Episodic attention. Activity tends to arrive in bursts around a narrative rather than building steadily.
What it is not
"Memecoin" describes what supports a token's price, not its size, its quality or its legal status. Some have persisted for years and reached large market capitalisations; many do not survive their first cycle. The label is a classification, and it carries no view about any particular token.
In MoonWire analysis
Memecoin activity is tracked as a sector in our corpus, because bursts of it describe where speculative attention is sitting. In September 2026 we covered a memecoin that ran a new chain's on-ramp backwards, pulling volume onto a network that had been pitched as a route in the other direction. We report what the sources we track say about these tokens and describe the activity; we do not make a case for or against owning any of them.