A joke with a ticker

The most honest thing anyone ever built in crypto was a joke. In late 2013, a software engineer named Billy Markus and a marketer named Jackson Palmer — who had never met — turned a popular internet meme of a side-eyeing Shiba Inu into a cryptocurrency, mostly to poke fun at how seriously everyone was taking the whole thing. They called it Dogecoin. Markus wrote the code in a few hours by lightly editing an existing coin; Palmer registered the domain and slapped the dog on it in Comic Sans.¹ It was a parody of speculative mania. It became one of the most durable speculative assets of the next decade.

I find this history genuinely important, and not as a curiosity. The meme coin is where the question I keep circling — why do people pour real money into things with no cash flow, no product, no obvious reason to exist? — stops being abstract. A stock is at least a claim on a business. A Dogecoin is a claim on a feeling. And yet the feeling has, at moments, been worth more than most of the companies in the S&P 500. To understand the casino that finance is becoming, you have to understand the purest chip on the table. It started as a dog.

The joke (2013)

Dogecoin was, at the start, almost aggressively wholesome. The community tipped each other fractions of a coin for good posts. Dogecoin.com drew over a million visitors in its first month.¹ And then it did the thing that made it briefly beloved: it gave money away. In January 2014 the community raised roughly $30,000 in Dogecoin to send the Jamaican bobsled team to the Sochi Olympics; months later it raised about $55,000 to put the doge on NASCAR driver Josh Wise's car at Talladega.² For a moment, the joke had a heart — a parody of crypto greed that spent its first year being conspicuously generous.

The founders didn't stay for what came next. Palmer walked away in 2015, increasingly disturbed by the culture forming around the thing he'd co-created; he later called cryptocurrency "an inherently right-wing, hyper-capitalistic technology" engineered to "extract new money from the financially desperate and naive."³ Markus sold his entire stash the same year — coins that would later be worth a fortune — for roughly the price of a used Honda Civic.³ Both creators got out before the punchline. The joke kept going without them, which is the first real lesson here: a meme doesn't belong to whoever made it. It belongs to whoever keeps repeating it.

The joke gets rich (2021)

For years Dogecoin idled as a curiosity. Then 2021 happened. Elon Musk, mid-ascension to the most-followed account on the internet, adopted it as a bit — "Dogecoin is the people's crypto," an endless stream of dog tweets, a promised "Dogefather" appearance on Saturday Night Live. On May 8, 2021, he delivered it, and on live television called Dogecoin "a hustle." The price fell roughly 30% during the broadcast.⁴ But by then the joke had already done something absurd: days earlier it had touched about 74 cents, a peak market value somewhere around $85–88 billion.⁴ A coin built to mock speculation was, for a few weeks in 2021, worth more than Ford.

Here a quick, important piece of arithmetic, because the headline numbers in this world are designed to dazzle and mislead. A coin's "market cap" is just its price times the number of coins in existence:

Dogecoin trades for pennies, but there are well over a hundred billion of them, so pennies times a hundred-plus billion is tens of billions of "dollars." The catch — and it matters for everything that follows — is that this number is almost entirely notional. Nobody could ever sell $88 billion of Dogecoin; the moment you tried, the price would collapse, because there was never $88 billion of real money inside it. The market cap is the size of the belief, not the size of the bank account. Keep that distinction; the whole genre runs on blurring it.

The same week, a different casino

The meme coin didn't rise in a vacuum. Four months before Dogecoin's blow-off top, in January 2021, a different crowd had done a structurally identical thing to a stock. Retail traders organized on Reddit's WallStreetBets drove GameStop from around $17 to an intraday high near $483, detonating the hedge funds that had bet against it; when Robinhood abruptly restricted buying on January 28, the backlash was nuclear.⁵ GameStop wasn't really about GameStop. It was about a feeling — that the game was rigged, that the institutions deserved a bloody nose, that a meme and a coordinated crowd could move markets the pros thought they owned.

That is the same DNA as the meme coin, down to the vocabulary: "to the moon," "diamond hands," "HODL," the in-jokes, the populist David-versus-Goliath framing, the gamified zero-commission app as the on-ramp. Meme stocks and meme coins are not cousins; they are the same phenomenon wearing two outfits, and a lot of the same people moved straight from one to the other — many through the very same Robinhood account. This is the through-line of the whole story: speculation had become a form of cultural participation. You didn't buy the coin because you'd modeled its cash flows. You bought it because you were in on the joke, and being in cost money, and the money could go up.

The killers, the cycles

Once a joke proves it can mint billions, it gets imitators, and the imitators get less innocent each cycle. Shiba Inu, launched in 2020 by an anonymous founder who went by "Ryoshi," styled itself the "Dogecoin killer." Its marketing masterstroke was sending half its supply, unsolicited, to Ethereum's Vitalik Buterin — who, in May 2021, burned about $6.7 billion of it to a dead address and donated roughly $1.2 billion to India's COVID relief fund, saying he didn't want the power.⁶ SHIB still rode the mania to a peak around $40 billion.⁶ Then came SafeMoon, which spiked over 55,000% in 2021 before its founders were eventually charged with fraud by the SEC and DOJ.⁷ The joke was acquiring a rap sheet.

The next wave moved to Solana, a faster, cheaper chain better suited to the casino. BONK arrived in December 2022, just after the FTX collapse, as a morale-boosting community airdrop; dogwifhat — a picture of a dog in a knitted hat, with no ambition beyond being a dog in a hat — reached a market value above $3 billion by mid-2024.⁸ Each cycle the time-to-billions got shorter and the pretense got thinner. By 2024 nobody bothered pretending a meme coin would "revolutionize payments." The product was the pump itself.

The apotheosis (2025)

Which brings us to the moment the joke finished eating the establishment. By December 2024 the total value of all meme coins had peaked near $150 billion.⁹ And then, on the Friday night before his second inauguration in January 2025, the incoming President of the United States launched his own. $TRUMP rocketed to a peak price around $75 and a circulating market value reported in the $8–12 billion range within two days, with roughly 80% of the supply controlled by Trump-affiliated entities; two days later a $MELANIA coin appeared and promptly siphoned value out of the first.¹⁰ A genre invented to mock financial seriousness had reached the most serious office on earth. Whatever else you think of it, it was the perfect ending to the story this piece is telling: the joke didn't lose. The joke won so completely that the establishment adopted it.

What's hard — the two honest reactions

I don't want to tell this as a triumph, because it isn't one — not cleanly. The wholesome charity coin of 2014 became, by 2025, a machine that mostly transfers money from latecomers to insiders, and I'll spend the next two pieces on exactly how. The single best evidence of the rot is the two founders themselves. Palmer became crypto's most quotable critic, calling the whole edifice a "get rich quick" funnel aimed at the desperate.³ Markus stayed online as a bemused jester, treating the monster he co-wrote as a joke that got out of hand. Those are the two honest reactions to this history — scorched-earth disgust and rueful laughter — and I think you need to hold both at once. The thing is genuinely funny and genuinely predatory. Pretending it's only one or the other is how people get fooled in both directions.

But dismissing it as "just a scam" misses the more interesting and more uncomfortable fact, which is the reason this is three pieces and not a footnote. Meme coins are not an aberration in markets. They are markets with the lab coat removed. Every asset's price is part fundamentals and part story — part what it earns and part what the crowd believes others will believe. The meme coin simply takes the second part and sells it neat, with no business attached to muddy the experiment. That it works at all — that a dog, a hat, a feeling can command billions — is telling you something true about where value actually comes from in an attention economy.

So the real question isn't "why would anyone buy a joke?" It's the one underneath it: why does a joke have a price at all? That's not a dismissal. It's the most important question in this whole strange corner of finance, and it deserves a serious answer.