Meme Coins: Shiba and Doge – Is It Time to Take Joke Crypto Seriously
Anything can become a meme these days, but not everything will qualify. For instance, it has to come from popular culture and a deep place of humor. Most importantly, it needs to carry a message. Some memes stay within a sub-culture while others spread as global inside jokes.
Meme coins were built on the same foundation – brought up as self-sustained comic relief in the crypto community. Like any cryptocurrency, they have a blockchain and a price tag. But like any meme, they were meant to make people laugh.
That is until someone made over two million dollars from Dogecoin, one of the pioneering meme coins. Everyone who had bought Dogecoin for the meme at that point did a double-take at their portfolio and even though we’d never be able to see it, their faces must have looked pretty funny.
Following Dogecoin, there came a plethora of other joke crypto coins, one of which, the undisputed champion of memes, was the Shiba Inu. This little dog was a meme superstar way before it became a coin. Riding on its own fame, the Shiba was able to catch up to Dogecoin, now sitting on the top along with the likes of Samoyed Coin and Doge Dash.
Meme coins have been on the rise in the last year, but hardly any of them have yet to reach the $1 mark. Whether they will someday become the next bitcoin is still being written, but the hype is definitely real.
Meme Coins – How Different Are They From Regular Crypto?
Let’s make one thing clear: meme coins are actual, legit cryptocurrencies. That means you are able to profit from them and trade them as you would with any other coin or token.
The main difference between meme coins and regular cryptocurrencies is the purpose. Mainstream crypto like bitcoin and Ethereum were made by the vision and serve the market in ways, such as decentralization and fast transactions, that no other product can. Meme coins don’t have any of that. They are driven by humor and maintained by the communities that support them.
It’s sort of like how Walmart is different from Craigslist. Under normal circumstances, if you want to buy a product offered by both places, would you go to Walmart or buy from some rando on Craigslist? Of course, there are always people who would choose the second option. There is a good reason for that. We just don’t know what it is. But those people are probably the same ones who invested in meme coins.
Another big difference is the price. Due to an overflowing supply, most meme coins are hanging out at several decimals from $1 and will likely remain there for a while. For a little over $3, you can get about 100,000 Shiba coins at the time of this writing.
How cheap they are is also their advantage, however. Traders have an intrinsic love for attainable assets and it shows by the market capitalization of meme coins. Dogecoin is sitting at $21 billion with each coin sold for less than 25 cents, followed closely by Shiba at $18 billion. They’re like low-hanging fruits, but very, very tiny ones.
Meme Coins – Are They Worth an Investment?
Despite the lack of direction, meme coins serve a different type of need. Investors are typically drawn to new things, and for which without a blueprint like Dogecoin and Shiba, anything goes. It’s similar to how there are products on Craigslist that Walmart can never offer, whether they’re at all useful. That is the niche little corner of desire meme coins cater to.
Another thing that makes meme coins so attractive is the barrier of entry or lack thereof. Their prices are so low that the dream of owning thousands of cryptocurrencies has finally come true for many. Remember when bitcoin was $1 a piece and people laughed? Well, those same people cried in 2021 and there is no way they’d make the same mistake again.
The real appeal here is what meme coins can potentially become – the implication of a breakthrough. Imagine holding tens of thousands of coins and all it has to do is reach $1. Early Ethereum investors share that sentiment but even back then in 2014 most of them were hesitant. Any slight deviance from the established glory of bitcoin was approached with caution. Nowadays, so many crypto coins have achieved success to some degree and that has given traders more options, which often leads to ambitious takes.
For meme coins to reach the one-dollar mark, however, they need to climb tens of thousands of times in value, even hundreds of thousands for some. The only thing that has ever done so is bitcoin, and it took more than 13 years.
Dogecoin is the current meme leader and its price has gone up by over 1,000 times since its creation. That’s the closest any of its kind has ever come. Unlike other meme coins, Doge was actually used for tipping, so it had some sort of purpose. Those waiters who received hundreds of Dogecoin for tips were angry then but today they could buy a nice house. That is exactly what’s driving these coins.
Considering the constant influx of new coins, tokens, and NFTs we have these days, it’s hard to say if any meme coin would manage to stay relevant for the next 13 years, let alone climb in value.
Conclusion
Cryptocurrencies come and go regularly like customers in a crowded shop. Some may stay but you have to be willing to bet that they will. For now, investing in meme coins is the same as investing in your entertainment. If you’re willing to enjoy the hype for a while and forget about it, then these coins might be a lot of fun. You can always dig them up if things decide to change. Who knows, you might come back to a hefty surprise.