Rewind to 2021 when meme coins were all the rage and you missed your chance to be a 23-year-ol billionaire. How are those coins performing today?
Rewind to 2021 and you’re doom-scrolling X (back when it was still called Twitter) when suddenly the whole finance world seems to be raving about… a Shiba Inu dog?
Enter Dogecoin.
At first you laugh at the unseriousness of it all, but three months later Dogecoin is up 7,000% and you wonder if you’ve just missed your chance to be a 23 year old billionaire.
Let’s investigate how the internet’s favourite meme coins are performing in 2026.
The OG meme-coin that started in 2013, Dogecoin went viral multiple times thanks to celebrity tweets (hi Elon Musk), and is still the most recognisable meme coin globally.
In 2021, Dogecoin was all over reddit forums (r/WallStreetBets), Tiktok, and Twitter which sent its price soaring. In May 2021, Dogecoin reached an all time high of $0.73 USD (over $85 billion market cap).
But now? Dogecoin’s 7 day trading range is $0.08-$0.11 USD, which is about 85-90% lower than its peak. Yikes.
That being said, Dogecoin is still the largest memecoin by market cap, currently valued at over $17.2 billion USD!
In 2020, an anonymous person (or group of people) under the pseudonym “Ryoshi” created Shiba Inu as the Dogecoin competitor. It quickly gained hype in 2021 and still has a fairly active community of developers backing it today.
But as they say, the higher the climb the harder the fall. At its all time high in October 2021, Shiba Inu was worth $0.00008616 USD (over $32 billion market cap) and now has a 7 day trading range of $0.055778 – $0.057209 USD (about 90% below peak).
Yup, that's a lot of zeros.
Pepe is a popular memecoin that was launched in 2023 and is inspired by Pepe the frog meme. Rather than focusing on complex use cases, this token is centered purely around internet culture and entertainment.
Pepe rose to fame more recently, surging 7,000% to reach its peak of $0.00002803 USD (over $11 billion market cap) in 2024. But similar to other memecoins, the value of Pepe is very volatile, with a 7 day trading range of $0.053503 – $0.054949 USD (about 84% below peak).
Pudgy Penguins began as an NFT collection in 2021 by a group of university students, and then expanded to become an instantly iconic memecoin at the end of 2024.
The PENGU token’s most popular period was soon after launching in 2024, where it reached a top price of $0.06845 USD ($2.3 billion market cap) and has since fallen to a 7 day trading range of $0.005875 – $0.008111 USD (about 90% below peak).
But the Pudgy Penguins community remains highly active, and they’ve just announced a Visa Debit card product that investors seemed excited by!
Finally, the Official Trump coin was launched in January 2025, three days before Trump began his second term as the US president. After Trump made an official announcement about the meme coin on X, the coin’s value skyrocketed overnight.
The US Official Trump token value reached its peak shortly after launching, with a price of $74.43 USD and market cap of $14.5 billion. Since then, the president’s coin has dropped sharply to a 7 day range of $3.12 – $3.63 USD.
So yes, the right meme coin at the right time could have turned you into a 23 year old billionaire with a lime green Lambo.
BUT meme coin wealth isn’t built on strategy, it’s built on timing.
And timing markets with memes, tweets and TikTok trends is less investing… and more synchronised gambling with millions of strangers.
Do you think meme coins will make a comeback?
Sign up for Flux and join 100,000 members of the Flux family
