Some prominent dog-themed meme coins are fetching higher prices to start the week, with coins modeled on Dogecoin’s mascot jumping higher—alongside a Bitcoin-based meme coin that’s dedicated to a puppy wearing an orange hoodie.
DOG•GO•TO•THE•MOON (aka DOG), a so-called Runes token that launched alongside the protocol’s debut in April, set an all-time high price of $0.0096 late Sunday, according to data from CoinGecko. Meanwhile, its market cap hit $966 million, surpassing a previous peak seen in June.
Runes was developed by Casey Rodarmor, whose Ordinals project sparked a buzzy market for Bitcoin-based collectibles following its release last year. Together, the projects seek to bring assets resembling meme coins and NFTs to crypto’s O.G. network.
Meme coins are extremely volatile assets, even by crypto standards, trading on little more than vibes and the attention they can muster online. While Dogecoin’s $64 billion market cap looms large in the meme coin space, its success has paved the way for countless tokens riding on its canine coattails over the years, which basically exist on any chain that one can think of.
DOG•GO•TO•THE•MOON was launched by its pseudonymous co-creator Leonidas in April, who airdropped the token widely to holders of the Runestone Ordinals project. Among notable trading venues, the Bitcoin-based meme coin has since been listed on the OKX exchange and cross-chain NFT marketplace Magic Eden.
“A new all-time high is especially exciting because we did it without a spot listing on a tier-1 exchange,” Leonidas told Decrypt.
Though DOG’s price has increased 35% over the past week, investors have meanwhile looked toward meme coins with four-legged mascots on other chains. Among notable gainers, those included Baby Doge Coin on BNB Chain and Neiro on Ethereum.
Baby Doge Coin (BABYDOGE) was launched in 2021, and of course, it pays homage to Dogecoin. Though its peak price Monday was still below a peak of $0.000000006288, the meme coin’s price jumped 33%, placing it within striking distance of a previous all-time high.
When Dogecoin’s mascot, a Shiba Inu dog named Kabosu, passed away in May, the development was felt far outside the cryptosphere. Soon after, however, a 10-year-old rescue pooch named Neiro was later adopted by Kabosu’s owner, which the crypto community was quick to embrace.
Meme coins inspired by Neiro were launched separately on Ethereum and Solana. And while neither have been endorsed by Nerio’s owner, an Ethereum-based version of Neiro (NEIRO) reached a $1.1 billion market cap last month. On Monday, the token’s value increased by 10%, reaching a price of $0.002, according to CoinGecko.
Notably, DOG, Neiro, and Baby Doge Coin saw outsized trading volumes on Gate.io, a Cayman Islands-based exchange. Each coin had notched $61 million, $56 million, and $187 million in trading volume over the past day, respectively, on the platform, according CoinGecko.
While Bitcoin transactions involving Runes accounted for 81% of network activity days after the protocol for memetic assets was launched in April, an initial wave of hype has receded. Still, Bitcoin transactions involving Runes totaled 8% of Bitcoin transactions Sunday, suggesting their on-chain presence remains somewhat robust, per data from Dune.
Edited by Andrew Hayward