Memecoins briefly took the cryptocurrency market by storm in 2021 after steady attention and shilling from big-name influencers like Elon Musk and Mark Cuban helped propel coins like Dogecoin (DOGE) to 100x gains.
As one should expect, in the crypto market, rapidly rising prices have a tendency to reverse course just as fast and many of the formerly high-flying meme tokens now find themselves struggling for survival as the market matures and investors look for real-world use cases.
Let’s take a look at some of the most popular memecoins of 2021 to see whether they were just a flash in the pan or if there are fundamental developments that may prove fruitful in the long-term.
Dogecoin
DOGE is the original memecoin and it helped kick off the rally of ‘21 after its price skyrocketed more than 20,000% from a low of $0.0036 on January 1, 2021 to an all-time high of $0.74 on May 8.
DOGE/USDT 1-day chart. Source: TradingView
Since that time, the price has deflated along with the wider crypto market and currently trades at a $0.135.
Out of all the memecoins, DOGE continues to be the most high profile of the pack despite not having any major developments in the works. It remains one of Elon Musk’s favorite Twitter topics and its price saw a notable bump recently when Musk started making offers to buy Twitter and take it private.
The move by Musk led to speculation that DOGE could be added as a tipping currency on the social media platform if the deal eventually goes through, which led to a brief pump in the price of DOGE.
Details about what comes next for Dogecoin are sparse with some chatter still circulating about earlier discussions to make the network proof-of-stake, but nothing concrete has been announced.
One developer for the project will be holding a workshop exploring messaging services within person-to-person protocols like Dogecoin, indicating that there is some exploration into other possible use cases for the longest-running meme-themed network.
Shiba Inu
While Dogecoin receives a lot of the big influencer…
..
