The Secret Behind Meme Coin Surges: Why Spreading is More Important Than Pumping?

How a Joke Turned Into $85 Billion

One night in May 2021, you open your trading app and suddenly see a token with a Shiba Inu avatar squeezing into the top ten by market cap.

This thing is called Dogecoin, born in 2013. Two programmers just wanted to make a joke—to mock people crazily speculating on crypto. Unlimited supply, no whitepaper, even they themselves didn’t take it seriously.

And the result? It soared as high as $0.74, with a market cap surpassing $85 billion.

You might ask: How?

The answer lies in every meme that gets shared, in the “To the Moon” slogan, and most of all, in the hands of those holders who have been organizing charity drives, sponsoring race car drivers, and playing with memes for a decade.

When Memes Become Assets

Dogecoin started as a tipping tool on Reddit. Someone posted something funny, others tipped a few DOGE. The community had so much fun, they even crowdfunded to sponsor the Jamaican bobsled team at the Winter Olympics.

No tech innovation. Zero marketing budget. The founders had long since left.

Elon Musk’s tweets did give it a boost, but what really kept it alive were the “DOGE believers”—the ones still creating memes, hosting online parties, and shilling the Shiba Inu during bear markets.

Cultural stickiness—tougher than any code.

Shiba Inu (SHIB) in 2020 learned quickly. They boldly called themselves the “Dogecoin Killer,” formed the “SHIB Army,” and made every retail investor feel like part of a movement. In 2021, it surged 120,000x, with a market cap hitting $36 billion.

Even crazier was 2023’s PEPE coin. A “sad frog” with no team, no roadmap—just memes spreading wildly online, and a $7 billion market cap in two weeks.

See the pattern?

The price of these coins isn’t written in code—it’s written in Twitter retweets, Telegram group counts, and meme spread velocity.

Stop Asking the Team to “Pump” the Price

Many newbies buy meme coins and immediately ask in the community, “When moon?”

Bro, you’ve got it backwards.

Meme coins aren’t like stocks. Stocks have companies behind them, Bitcoin has technology, meme coins only have one thing—consensus.

The project team at most is just the igniter. The real “whales” are every holder.

PEPE is the perfect example. No founder, no dev team, just internet users pushing memes on social platforms, making images, and spreading the hype. Every time you share a PEPE meme, every time you tell a friend how funny the frog is, you are “empowering” it.

Every act of sharing increases the value of the symbol.

On the flip side, if a community just chants “pump,” it’s like a group of people guarding a fishpond with no way to breed—sooner or later, they’ll run out. Hundreds of new meme coins pop up on Pump.fun every day, and 99% don’t last a week because they have only code, no culture, and no one willing to spread them.

Attention Is Money

In an age of information overload, the most valuable thing isn’t gold or Bitcoin—it’s attention.

Meme coins are essentially the securitization of attention. Every meme you see, every comment, every retweet, is adding value to a token.

Algorithms love fun content, and meme coins are inherently designed for social media. A funny image spreads a hundred times faster than a whitepaper, and a “To the Moon” slogan ignites FOMO better than any technical spec.

Meme coins on Solana and Base are especially active because of fast speeds and low fees—perfect for retail investors to trade and spread memes frequently. The technology is just infrastructure; the real engine is the “social currency” manufactured by the community.

If You Want to Play, Remember These Three Rules

1. Choose a Symbol You Truly Believe In

Don’t buy meme coins you don’t understand. If a meme doesn’t make you laugh, don’t expect others to spread it. Most PEPE holders are Gen Z who grew up using the frog meme—they spread it because they genuinely like it, not just for profit.

2. Be a Spreader, Not a Waiter

Instead of staring at the chart all day, think about how to help more people learn about your meme coin. Make a funny image, write a joke, or comment under related topics. Every creative act you make adds value to the coin you hold.

3. Treat It as Entertainment

Meme coins are basically “cultural lottery tickets.” They have more cultural value than pure gambling, but are still highly speculative. Never put in more than you can afford to lose; treat it like buying a ticket to an amusement park—having fun is the main thing, making money is just a bonus.

The IPO of Internet Culture

By turning memes into cryptocurrencies, we’re essentially doing an “IPO” for internet culture. Every meme coin pump is a grassroots culture ambush against traditional finance.

But remember: no spread, no value.

The promises made by project teams or the calls from KOLs are not as powerful as that meme in your phone ready to be posted on Moments. Instead of waiting for someone else to pump, why not open your drawing app now and create your own financial culture symbol for this era?

After all, in the attention economy, everyone is their own whale.