Dogecoin was created in December 2013 by two engineers who thought crypto was getting too serious. The joke became a community. The community became a movement. The movement became a $40 billion market cap at peak.
The memecoin category has never been taken seriously by traditional finance. That's always been their mistake.
2013: The Joke That Started It All
Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer created DOGE in about 3 hours. It used the Shiba Inu "doge" meme and the tagline "very currency, such wow." The point was to make fun of the proliferation of altcoins.
What happened instead: people loved it. The DOGE community became famous for its generosity, sponsoring everything from NASCAR drivers to the Jamaican bobsled team. The irony became sincerity became genuine community.
2020-2021: The Memecoin Supercycle
DeFi Summer introduced the concept of tokens as community coordination mechanisms. The 2020-2021 bull market brought retail into crypto in massive numbers. When Elon Musk started tweeting about DOGE, the conditions were set for the first memecoin supercycle.
- DOGE: 15,000% in a year
- Shiba Inu: Created as "DOGE killer," 50,000,000% at peak
- Elongate, SafeMoon, and thousands of others: Most went to zero
2024: The pump.fun Era
pump.fun changed everything. For the first time, launching a token required no technical knowledge and minimal capital. The result: thousands of new tokens daily. Most worthless. A few catching genuine community momentum.
The best ones weren't just jokes — they had narratives. Stories that resonated. Communities that believed.
2025: The AI Memecoin
From DOGE's inside joke to $AIREVOLT's autonomous mission — memecoins have come a long way. And they're not done evolving.