Blog

In April 2023, an artist named Rhett Mankind ran an experiment: he gave GPT-4 a budget of $69 and asked the AI to create and launch a memecoin from scratch. The result was TURBO — a token whose entire concept, branding, name, and marketing strategy was generated by AI. The launch was almost performance art: human artist, AI co-founder, real money on the line.

TURBO succeeded spectacularly. Within weeks, the token had a market cap exceeding $100 million. It listed on major exchanges. The community embraced the AI-creator narrative. TURBO became the first memecoin to prove that artificial intelligence could not just describe meme culture but actually participate in it. It was a glimpse of the future: a world where AI and humans collaborate on internet jokes that produce real wealth. The memecoin economy had entered a new phase.

In October 2024, a Solana memecoin called Goatseus Maximus (GOAT) emerged from an unusual source: an AI agent called Truth Terminal, run by a researcher experimenting with autonomous AI personalities. Truth Terminal had been generating bizarre, mystical content for months. When it began obsessing over the GOAT token, the crypto community took notice.

GOAT exploded. Within weeks it had a market cap exceeding $1 billion. The story was unprecedented: a memecoin had been “endorsed” not by a celebrity or influencer, but by an autonomous AI agent. Crypto Twitter debated whether this was the start of a new era — AI agents becoming market movers — or just a one-off curiosity. Either way, GOAT proved that the line between human-driven and AI-driven memes had begun to blur. The next memecoin cycle might not be made by humans at all.

By 2022, SafeMoon was unraveling. Class action lawsuits had been filed alleging the team had pulled liquidity for personal gain. Influencers who had promoted SafeMoon faced their own lawsuits. The price collapsed 99% from its highs. In November 2023, the SEC charged SafeMoon executives — including CEO John Karony and creator Kyle Nagy — with securities fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering. The Department of Justice followed with criminal charges.

According to prosecutors, the SafeMoon team had drained liquidity from the project to fund mansions, sports cars, and lifestyles, all while telling the community their funds were locked. Tens of thousands of holders lost everything. The SafeMoon story became the cautionary tale of the 2021 memecoin era — proof that not every meme with a friendly logo and a clever marketing pitch was a charity coin like Doge. Some were straight-up frauds.

In June 2021, Elon Musk tweeted about getting a Shiba Inu puppy and naming him Floki, after the Viking character from the show. Within days, multiple “Floki” tokens had launched on Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain. Eventually one — simply called Floki Inu — survived and consolidated the meme. It became the third major dog memecoin after DOGE and SHIB.

Unlike most Elon-inspired tokens, Floki built actual products. They launched an NFT gaming platform called Valhalla, an educational platform called Floki University, and a DeFi suite. They also ran one of the most aggressive marketing campaigns in crypto history — putting Floki ads on London buses, World Cup ads, billboards in Times Square. By 2024, Floki had a market cap in the billions and a real ecosystem. It became the most legitimate “Elon coin” without ever being officially endorsed by him.

Baby Doge Coin launched in June 2021 on Binance Smart Chain. The pitch: it was Doge’s son. The logo featured a small Shiba Inu puppy. The marketing leaned hard into the cuteness factor. It became one of the most viral memecoins of the BSC era, partly because Elon Musk tweeted “Baby Doge, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo” — referencing the children’s song that had become a meme.

Like SafeMoon, Baby Doge had a tax-on-transactions tokenomics designed to reward holders. Unlike SafeMoon, the team avoided major scandals. Baby Doge eventually launched on Coinbase and major exchanges, became a recognized brand, and partnered with multiple animal rescue charities. Today it remains one of the more durable BSC-era memecoins. The lesson: cute branding plus consistent execution can outlast almost any market cycle.

Dogelon Mars launched in April 2021 with a perfect memecoin pitch: combine Dogecoin and Elon Musk into one ticker (ELON) and add a Mars-colonization theme. The logo featured a cartoon Shiba Inu in a space suit. The lore claimed Dogelon was a dog from the future, returned to Earth from a Mars colony, on a mission to save other intergalactic doggos.

The token went viral. ELON has remained one of the most consistently held memecoins, with a passionate community that produces art, animations, and even a graphic novel about the Dogelon character. While ELON has never reached the heights of DOGE or SHIB, it has proven remarkably durable through multiple bear markets. The lesson: a memecoin with a real story and a creative community can outlast tokens with much bigger pumps. ELON’s mythology became its moat.

In December 2022, Solana was in crisis. FTX had just collapsed. The Solana network was associated with Sam Bankman-Fried’s fraud. Trading volumes were dead. Then on Christmas Day 2022, an anonymous team launched BONK — a memecoin themed around a Shiba Inu, airdropped for free to over 200,000 Solana wallets. It was meant as a gift to revive the dying ecosystem.

BONK exploded. Within weeks it had a market cap in the hundreds of millions. Solana wallets that had received free airdrops found themselves holding life-changing money. More importantly, BONK proved that Solana wasn’t dead — it was just waiting for energy. The BONK launch single-handedly revived Solana memecoin culture and laid the groundwork for the 2023-2024 Solana memecoin supercycle. Sometimes the most strategic move in crypto is to give something away for free.

In November 2023, an anonymous team launched dogwifhat (ticker: WIF) on Solana. The image was simple: a Shiba Inu wearing a pink knitted hat. There was no team, no roadmap, no whitepaper — just the hat. Within months, WIF had become one of the most iconic crypto images of the cycle. Holders bought into the meme entirely. The community organized to put a giant WIF logo on the Las Vegas Sphere.

By March 2024, WIF had reached a market cap of $4 billion. It briefly became one of the top 50 cryptocurrencies in the world. The phrase “the hat is the story” became the rallying cry. WIF holders rejected any attempt to add utility or features — the hat was the entire product. dogwifhat proved that in the meme economy, simpler is better. Sometimes you just need a dog and a hat.

In July 2021, the SHIB team launched ShibaSwap, a decentralized exchange built on Ethereum that let users swap, stake, and earn rewards in SHIB and related tokens. The launch was anticipated for months. Promotional materials called features by SHIB-themed names: “Dig” for liquidity provision, “Bury” for staking, “Fetch” for buying. The branding was relentlessly on-meme.

ShibaSwap launched with over $1 billion in liquidity within days. It became one of the largest DEXs on Ethereum. More importantly, it gave SHIB something most memecoins lacked: actual infrastructure. Holders could now use SHIB for something other than holding. The token had moved from pure meme to functional ecosystem in less than a year. ShibaSwap proved that meme communities could build real products if they had the discipline.

Alongside SHIB, Ryoshi launched two complementary tokens. LEASH is a deflationary token with a tiny supply of just 107,000 — designed for whales who wanted exposure to the SHIB ecosystem without holding trillions of regular SHIB. BONE is the governance token of the SHIB ecosystem, used for voting on proposals in ShibaSwap and the Shibarium Layer 2 network. BONE has a supply of 250 million.

Together, the three tokens form what the community calls “the SHIB Trinity.” Each serves a different purpose: SHIB is the main meme coin, LEASH is the rare prestige token, and BONE is the utility/governance token. The structure mimics how successful crypto ecosystems are typically built — multiple tokens with different roles. SHIB was one of the first memecoins to attempt this kind of layered tokenomics, and it worked.