MEMELINE

Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer launch Dogecoin on December 6, 2013. It starts out as literally a joke about how seriously crypto had started to take itself, built around the Doge / Kabosu meme.

Reddit begins using DOGE for tipping and the community grows quickly. This is really the starting point for the entire memecoin idea.

Throughout these years there are countless small joke coins, but no real memecoin market exists yet. Dogecoin, however, keeps living on through Reddit, internet culture and community.

The important part here is that DOGE proves something that later becomes fundamental: a coin doesn't necessarily need new technology. The culture and the community can be the product itself.

The anonymous creator Ryoshi launches SHIB on Ethereum in August 2020.

A new model emerges: instead of Dogecoin being an old joke that happened to become a currency, you can intentionally create a token around a meme and try to build a community around it.

This becomes very important for the next bull market.

Elon Musk's tweets about Dogecoin have an enormous effect. DOGE goes from an old internet coin to a global speculation phenomenon.

In March 2021, SafeMoon launches and explodes through TikTok, Twitter, influencers and retail. It isn't a classic meme like DOGE, but it becomes part of the same retail-driven 'moon coin' culture.

On May 8, Elon Musk hosts Saturday Night Live. Going into the show, Dogecoin reaches a valuation of around $80B and becomes a mainstream phenomenon. This is perhaps the first time the world truly sees: meme + famous person + social media + speculation = a massive market.

SHIB grows explosively. Then come a flood of clones: Baby Doge, Akita, Kishu, Dogelon Mars, Floki and other Inu/Doge coins.

In June 2021, Elon Musk writes that his Shiba Inu will be named Floki. Shortly after, the FLOKI token is created.

By October 2021, SHIB mania makes it one of the world's largest cryptocurrencies. 2021 establishes the first real memecoin formula: meme → community → Twitter/TikTok → influencers → CEX listings → retail FOMO. Then much of the speculation collapses along with the 2022 crypto bear market.

For most of 2022 the market is dead compared to 2021. But something very important happens at the end of the year.

In November 2022, FTX collapses. Solana is hit especially hard because FTX / Alameda had been tightly connected to the ecosystem, and SOL trades down brutally.

On Christmas Day, BONK launches as a community coin for Solana. More than half of the supply is distributed to Solana builders and creators. In hindsight this is enormous — BONK helps make Solana, instead of Ethereum, the center of the next memecoin generation.

PEPE launches on Ethereum in April 2023. Unlike the 2021 dog-coin wave, it's built on an already extremely established internet meme.

It reaches around $1B market cap within weeks.

This starts a new philosophy: coins don't need a roadmap, staking or 'utility'. The meme is the utility. PEPE becomes the largest new memecoin launch of 2023.

In the fall of 2023, SOL recovers strongly. Trading becomes cheap and fast compared to Ethereum, and BONK starts to gain new momentum.

WIF launches on November 20, 2023. The concept is almost absurdly simple: literally just a dog wif a hat. No big utility, no advanced roadmap.

It becomes one of the most important coins going into 2024.

On January 19, 2024, Pump.fun goes live. The founders — Alon Cohen, Noah Tweedale and Dylan Kerler — had traded memecoins themselves and experienced how launches often worked through insiders, influencers, liquidity manipulation and rugs.

The idea is to standardize the whole process. Anyone can: create coin → bonding curve → traders buy → coin graduates → liquidity, without having to build a smart contract or manually create an LP.

This is an enormous historical turning point. Before Pump.fun: someone 'launched a project'. After Pump.fun: anyone could tokenize almost any thought in minutes.

This is one of the most important months in the entire history. WIF gets a Binance listing on March 5, and the community raises around $650,000 to try to put WIF on the Las Vegas Sphere. Memecoins start to feel like internet culture rather than normal crypto projects.

Book of Meme (BOME) does an enormous presale and explodes. Trading starts around March 14 and Binance lists BOME already on March 16 — showing how fast the process had become: launch → viral → hundreds of millions → Binance, in days.

On March 18, SLERF raises around $10M in presale. The developer then accidentally burns the tokens meant for presale buyers. Instead of the project dying, the story goes viral and SLERF reaches hundreds of millions in market cap. Meanwhile MEW ('cat in a dogs world') helps start the 'cat coin' narrative. The story around a coin can be worth more than the project itself.

More and more traders start going directly to new coins instead of waiting for established launches. The 'trenches' culture starts to properly take shape.

It increasingly revolves around: new pairs, wallets, snipers, devs, CTOs, bonding, DexScreener, Telegram callers — and extremely fast rotations.

On May 26, JENNER launches via Pump.fun and the market realizes celebrities can now be launched / tokenized directly. The celebrity wave begins.

Iggy Azalea drives MOTHER. Then more celebrity / influencer coins appear around figures like Jason Derulo, Andrew Tate, Caitlyn Jenner and Iggy Azalea, roughly May–August 2024.

Memecoins now become less about just memes. You're trading people.

Thousands of coins are created. Traders start tokenizing almost all internet culture: animals, celebrities, tweets, news, memes, political moments, TikTok clips and random viral content. This is the seed of what can later be called a trend market.

In September 2024, Moo Deng becomes an enormous internet trend and memecoin. It shows yet another model: viral Web2 animal → instantly tokenized → crypto speculation. Internet trends and the memecoin market start to move almost in parallel.

On October 10, Truth Terminal — the AI agent created by Andy Ayrey — starts talking about Goatseus Maximus. A human then creates GOAT on Pump.fun, and Truth Terminal begins endorsing the coin. GOAT explodes.

It's important to distinguish: Truth Terminal did not create the token itself. An anonymous / human Pump.fun user made it, and the AI agent carried the narrative forward.

This kicks off the AI Agent Meta. After it come a flood of AI agents, AI personalities, autonomous traders, AI-generated memes and AI coins. Now AI itself can be the meme.

Pump.fun livestreaming explodes. Creators start doing increasingly extreme things to pump their coins.

A well-known example is Gen Z Quant, where a 13-year-old creator sells his holdings after the livestream and the community then pushes the coin even higher.

Extreme content on the livestream platform leads to criticism, and Pump.fun shuts the livestream feature down indefinitely in November. This shows the next evolution: creator attention → token value.

The memecoin market is now much broader than Doge. The market trades animals, AI, people, TikTok trends, politics, news, streamers, internet lore and current events all at the same time.

Hawk Tuah / HAWK becomes a big example of how a viral internet person can be tokenized — while controversies around celebrity coins keep growing.

This is another of history's biggest turning points. On January 17, Donald Trump officially launches $TRUMP on Solana just days before the inauguration. This was not a random community coin — it was launched by Trump-affiliated entities.

TRUMP explodes and reaches over $10B in market value in a very short time. Memecoins have gone from 'internet dog' to 'the incoming President of the United States launching one himself.' It's hard to find a clearer mainstream milestone.

On January 19, Melania Trump launches MELANIA. When it's announced, capital aggressively rotates out of TRUMP and TRUMP falls sharply. Now political identity = tradable meme.

Argentina's president Javier Milei posts about LIBRA. The coin's value explodes and then collapses.

Milei deletes the post and later says he had been misled; the event leads to political and legal controversy.

After TRUMP and LIBRA it becomes obvious how far the memecoin format has moved into mainstream politics.

On March 20, 2025, PumpSwap launches. Pump.fun no longer needs to send graduated coins to an external DEX in the same way.

They build more of the whole stack themselves: launch → bond → graduate → trade. Pump.fun moves from being a launchpad toward being a complete trading ecosystem.

On April 25, 2025, LetsBONK.fun launches. It's the BONK ecosystem's answer to Pump.fun.

For the first time, Pump gets a genuinely serious Solana launchpad competitor.

On May 13, 2025, Pump.fun introduces creator revenue sharing. Creators can now earn a share of the trading fees from their coins.

This is another huge structural change. Previously creators mainly earned through tokens; now a creator can earn on volume. It makes memecoin launching more like a creator economy.

LetsBONK grows and launchpads compete over creators, traders, fees, bonding, graduations and ecosystem incentives. The market is now trading not just which coin wins, but where coins are created.

On July 6, for the first time since Pump.fun launched, LetsBONK overtakes it in daily token launches and volume. During July, LetsBONK reaches around 64% of token launches according to The Block. This is Launchpad Wars for real.

On July 12, Pump.fun launches its own ecosystem token, PUMP. 15% of the supply is offered at $0.004/token — roughly a $4B FDV — and Pump says the sale sells out in about 12 minutes.

LetsBONK's dominance is short-lived. Pump.fun takes back first place.

In mid-August, Pump is reported to have gone from around 5% to roughly 90% launchpad share within a few weeks, depending on the measurement method.

On August 20, Pump.fun is also reported to have passed around $800M in lifetime revenue — showing how enormous the memecoin infrastructure business has become.

By this point the format itself has changed. A coin no longer needs to start with 'We built a crypto project.' It can start with 'Something just happened on the internet' — and then it gets tokenized.

Narratives rotate between AI, animals, politics, TikTok, news, personalities, streamers, culture, products and viral moments. Memecoins increasingly become a real-time prediction / attention market for internet culture.

The old definition of 'memecoin' starts to feel too narrow. Coins are created around things that aren't even memes: breaking news, viral TikToks, products, people, internet stories, KOLs, trading experiments, AI, events, politics, charity and communities. The key question is simply: is it getting attention?

From May 21, 2026, Pump.fun begins supporting USDC as a paired token — another step away from being only the original simple SOL memecoin launcher. The creator-fee system remains, while new fee models and cashback variants become part of the launchpad economy.

Launchpads evolve from 'create a coin' toward create → trade → stream → callout → community → creator fees → social graph. The memecoin market gradually merges with TikTok + Twitch + X + prediction markets + creator economy + trading terminal.