Meme Coins Surpass Bitcoin Gains as Crypto Market Gets Frothy Again

It’s been a good week for Bitcoin, with the leading cryptocurrency rising nearly 11% over the past seven days to a current price above $67,000, signaling the potential arrival of full-on “Uptober” gains. The hope that many traders were waiting for this month.

But Bitcoin’s gains pale in comparison to some of the major coins, whose prices have risen by as much as several times more than BTC. As money flows back into crypto, the market could become frothy again, prompting traders to bet on highly volatile meme coins.

Dogecoin (DOGE), the first-ever coin, is up 16% this week thanks to new attention from prominent booster Elon Musk, while Solana coin Bonk (BONK) climbed nearly 16%, and the Base Brett from the network (BRETT) has soared by almost 25% over the past seven days.

In fact, all of the top 15 meme coins by market cap are in the green – the smallest gainer being Shiba Inu (SHIB) at 7%.

The biggest winner of the week is Turbo Toad (TURBO), a massive increase of 71%. The token team marketed it as the “first meme coin created by artificial intelligence.” In April 2023, a Twitter user asked ChatGPT to generate a viral coin name. After the AI ​​chatbot created “Turbo Toad,” the user created images, a tokenomics plan, a white paper, and code, all with the help of the AI.

The success of Turbo comes after Maximus Goat (GOAT) reached a market capitalization of $285 million in just one week. “Goatseus Maximus” was first used as a term by a Twitter-based AI chatbot called Truth Terminal. It was set up to share tweets about meme coins, NFTand niche internet nonsense. This created the perfect storm for the latest viral coin to skyrocket in value, with one trader turning a $5,500 investment into $1.5 million on the coin.

In turn, the trenches began to fill with countless AI-related coins.

For example, degens found a message from Andressen Horowitzthe venture capital giant, announces an investment in an AI-related company. And since the partner of the firm Justine Moore used his dog for the announcement photo, it has now been made into a coin called a16z AI Dog (TILLY). Moore laughed about it on Twitter.

The token peaked at a market cap of $8 million, but has since crashed to a total value of just $560,000.

Other notable coin gainers this week include Doge-related Ethereum token Neiro (NEIRO) gaining 18%, the Mog coin generated by 4chan (KITTY) jumping 40%, and Cat in a Dog’s World, based on Solana (MEOW) jumping 49%.

As for the losers from the same corners, Sui chains Mood spin-off SuDeng (HIPPOPOTAMUS) fell 21%, Bitcoin PUPPIES fell 18%, and PepeCoin (PÉPÉCOIN) fell 13% over the past week.

Meme coins are usually based on internet memes, celebrities, world events, etc., and they tend to be very volatile, with thousands of launches daily. Most don’t gain much speed, and many of those who do gain ground tend to crash as quickly as they rise. Very few meme pieces, like some of those discussed above, stick around for very long.

Edited by Andrew Hayward