Memecoins Outperform as Crypto Does its Best to Button Up After Bitcoin ETF

As crypto careens into a new bull market, its advocates will be hoping detractors finally see that blockchain tech has the potential to disrupt industries from finance to social media.

However, based on the best-performing sectors in crypto, those naysayers could be forgiven for refusing to see the light.

Are the best-performing tokens in the Layer 2s category, key for scaling blockchain for mainstream usage? Perhaps they’re in the red-hot intersection between crypto and artificial intelligence? Or maybe those projects on the technical frontier of restaking, modular blockchains or DePIN.

Nope. Cat-themed Coins, Dog-themed Coins, Memes, and Fractionalized NFTs – which consist of mostly Doge-themed NFTs – are leading the charge.

At the top of Cat-Themed Coins is Taylor Swift’s Cat token, which is up by 25x in the last seven days. Banana Cat and Pop Cat come next. With a market cap of $730 million though, the cat coin sector can be easy to dismiss.

That’s not the case for the Meme category, which, to be fair, does have some overlap with cat and dog tokens. Meme coins now command a market cap of an astonishing $55 billion. That’s higher than the liquid staking sector, Layer 2s, and all gaming tokens.

The category on Coingecko has surged 77% in the past week, with dog-themed coins accounting for 85% of the sector as Doge, the OG meme coin, reigns supreme with a market cap of over $20 billion.

Both OGs and newcomers are making big moves. SHIB, PEPE, BONK, WIF, and FLOKI have more than doubled in the past seven days, adding billions of dollars to their market caps. Other big movers include POPCAT, which is up 800%, MYRO and MOG.

Meanwhile, there’s been a wave of new coins on Solana that are themed around caricatures of public figures like Joe Biden and, naturally, Donald Trump.

The story of a trader claiming to have turned $260 into nearly half a million dollars with ‘Jeo Boden’ went viral on social media, spawning a wave of coins like ‘Doland Tremp’ and ‘Olen Mosk.’

Solana has emerged as a favoured venue for trading memecoins due to its low transaction costs. Trading volumes on Solana-based decentralized exchanges (DEXs) topped $2 billion on Mar. 5, according to DeFiLlama.

Its share of DEX volumes has increased steadily to around 15% from less than 2% six months ago.