$WIF, $NEIRO, $POPCAT & more: Breaking Down the Memecoin Rally

The memecoin market has changed a lot in the past 6 months, with new leaders like WIF, POPCAT, and NEIRO taking central stage. We’ll look into the top memes of October 2024, including our own utility memecoin $LSD; look into the recent memecoin scandals; and discuss the hidden risks of buying memes.

TL;DR

• Memecoins are hotter than ever - and Pontem has just launched its own next-generation utility memecoin, $LSD. Unlike 99.9% of memes, $LSD has both memetic power (check out its mascot, the three-eyed alien Pepe) and the full tech power of Liquidswap and Pontem behind it.
• The latest wave of the meme craze centers on relatively new dog and cat memes, such as POPCAT, WIF, NEIRO, BONK, and MEW. Some are on Ethereum, but many are on Solana.
• Among the biggest recent controversies centered on memecoins, two different NEIRO tokens got listed on Binance, creating a lot of confusion. The community-run NEIRO (First Neiro on Ethereum) eventually won out over NEIROETH (Neiro on ETH), which was accused of being controlled by a “cabal”.
• In another controversy, leading meme coin KOL and the author of the “meme supercycle” concept Murad Mahmudov had his 11 wallets doxxed by the “crypto sleuth” ZachXBT, demonstrating that Murad holds $24 million worth of memes.
• In another scandal, NEIRO distanced themselves from the market maker GotBit after it was charged with market manipulation.
• Solana-based meme coin Peanut the Squirrel (PNUT) reached $130m in market cap after Elon Mus commented on the death of the Instagram-viral squirrel Peanut - only for the price to drop 70% days later. This illustrates the volatility of meme coins and the influence of public figures on market sentiment.
• Before investing in memecoins, you need to consider that each meme has a life cycle where very early investors benefit the most, while retail is often left holding worthless bags after the blow-off top. Whales can move memecoin prices to get their large orders filled, and they often use influencer marketing and other social media tools to get retail investors on board.
• It’s difficult to be profitable trading memecoins on-chain without using a bot, such as Banana or Trojan for Solana. By contrast, MEV sandwich bots aren’t a problem on Solana due to differences in technology with Ethereum.
• PEPE started a new memecoin boom, with tokens like WOJAK, LADYS, MONG, etc. also rallying.

The new wave of memes: WIF, POPCAT, BRETT & more

Back when we first covered memecoins, Pepe was the hottest thing in the market - but narratives change fast in crypto. PEPE is still the no.3 biggest meme after DOGE and SHIB, but the focus of the memecoin market has shifted to Solana and, to a smaller degree, to Base. If you look at the top 10 memecoins by market cap, you’ll see that many are newcomers.

Here are a few key facts about each of the relatively new memes that made waves in 2024 and that feature in the top 100 largest cryptocurrencies by market cap.

• $WIF, dogwifhat (and not Dog with Hat; Solana, launched in December 2023): the picture of an adorable shiba inu dog wearing a woven hat started circulating in 2019. When $WIF pumps, it’s customary to say, “the hat stays on”.

• $BONK, Bonk (Solana, launched in December 2022): the shiba inu character being hit on the head is actually called Cheems, while Bonk is the comical sound effect that it makes. $BONK was originally launched with a huge airdrop of 50% of the supply to Solana users.

• $POPCAT, Popcat (Solana, launched in December 2023): in the original meme, a cat called Oatmeal appears with its mouth closed and with a funny expression, followed by a Photoshopped image of the cat with the mouth open. Once joined in a video, the images make the impression of Oatmeal’s mouth popping open and closed.

The memecoin stayed off the radar for most of 2024 - only to blow up in late September at the head of a new cat meme rally.

• $BRETT, Based Brett (Base, launched in May 2024): the first big meme on the Base chain and its semi-official mascot. The blue, dance-loving character was created by Matt Furie, the same artist who gave us Pepe the Frog - in fact, in the Boy’s Club comic, Brett figures as one of Pepe’s best friends.

• $NEIRO, First Neiro on Ethereum (Ethereum, launched in July 2024): this memecoin has been at the center of not one but several controversies, which we’ll look at in the next section. Neiro is the name of the new shiba inu belonging to the same lady who used to own Kabosu, the iconic dog that became the Doge meme. Several Neiro memecoins immediately popped up, but this one was the first on Ethereum - thus the original name.

• $MOG, Mog Coin (Ethereum, launched in July 2023): yet another cat coin that was launched last year but achieved true popularity only in summer 2024. Interestingly, the logo of MOG isn’t based on a pre-existing meme image, and the token itself was launched as a joke by a group of friends rather than as a commercial project.

• $MEW, cat in a dogs world (Solana, launched in March 2024): the “dogs world” in the name of this memecoin points to the dominance of dog-themed memecoins in the first half of 2024. $MEW was the latest memecoin to have a strong rally in October 2024.

The memecoin season on Aptos: meet $LSD, the first utility meme on Move

The TVL on Aptos is higher than ever at $700+ million, as is the trading volume on Liquidswap by Pontem, the largest DEX on Aptos. Among the most-traded tokens are quite a few memes:

• $LSD, Liquidswap DAO: the first memecoin with utility on Aptos, launched by Pontem - that is, by us! It’s packed full of memetic power thanks to its three-eyed Pepe mascot, but it’s also the official governance token of the upcoming Liquidswap DAO and of the whole Pontem ecosystem. The $LSD liquidity pools on Liquidswap offer very attractive APRs (check them out here) - and staking is coming soon, too. If you’re an early adopter of Liquidswap, you may even be eligible for an $LSD airdrop.

• $doodoo: an unashamedly utility-free, ironic and even provocative memecoin with a tiny (for a meme) supply of just 42 million. doodoo has held up extremely well through the market volatility in September and October 2024, and its pools on Liquidswap also offer a good APR. Was doodoo created by Pontem? We can neither confirm nor deny, sorry folks.

• $UPTOS, Aptos’ Up Only
• $EDOG
• $DONK
• $MEOW
• $PUPTOS, and many others.

The latest big memecoin controversies: NEIRO listing, Murad and GotBit

Every now and then, everyone on Crypto X (also known as CT, or Crypto Twitter) will start tweeting about some new memecoin scandal - and you may feel lost if you don’t know how the story began. Below, we break down three big recent meme-centered debates that also help us understand a lot about how memecoins function.

NEIRO vs NEIROETH listing: who came first?

As soon as something meme-worthy happens, you’ll get several new memecoins with near-identical names popping up. Usually all but one quickly die - but what happens if two memes with virtually the same tickers get listed on exchanges? Total confusion, that’s what.

Neiro is a case in point. Search on Binance for Neiro, and you’ll see two different perpetual futures contracts: for NEIRO and NEIROETH. On KuCoin, there are NEIRO and NEIROCTO. And on CoinMarketCap, there are two tokens with the $NEIRO ticker in the top 500. Which is the ‘real’ Neiro, then?

As soon as the former owner of the Doge dog announced that she’d got a new shiba inu called Neiro, memes of the same name started popping up left and right. The one that is now known First Neiro on Ethereum (contract address 0x812ba41e071c7b7fa4ebcfb62df5f45f6fa853ee) is a community-driven project: the original devs actually abandoned the project early on, and the community took over. First Neiro on ETH acquired the support of such figures as Vitalik Buterin himself and Tron’s Justin Sun.

Soon, though, another Neiro project started gaining popularity: now it’s known as Neiro ETH and has the contract number 0xee2a03aa6dacf51c18679c516ad5283d8e7c2637. Unlike the “community NEIRO”, this token became known as the “cabal NEIRO”. A cabal is a small group of people who create a conspiracy; in the context of crypto, it’s a group of stakeholders who manipulate the market and the price of a token.

In case of Neiro ETH, the “cabal” apparently sniped 78% of the tokens at launch using 80 addresses to preserve the appearance of a fair launch, distributed them across 400 addresses, then carefully sold to make $4.5 million in profits.

In spite of this controversy, it was Neiro ETH that first got listed on Binance Futures on September 6 (with the ticker NEIROETH), followed by a big pump. On September 16, however, Binance also listed First Neiro on Ethereum on both spot and futures, under the ticker NEIRO.

At that time, the community NEIRO had a much smaller market cap (less than $20 million), but soon enough it overtook the “cabal NEIRO”. As of mid-October, First Neiro on Ethereum is no.78 on CoinMarketCap with a $845 million market cap, while the “cabal” token is only no.393 with a market cap of just $89.4 million.

An important takeaway from this story is that you should pay attention to contract addresses when dealing with memes. Remember that there is nothing stopping projects from launching tokens with tickers already in use by someone else, so there can be two or more legit projects with identical tickers - to say nothing of fraudulent copycats.

Also, the same token can be assigned different tickers or contract names from exchange to exchange. So always make sure to match the contract address on a project’s website or Twitter page and the exchange.

Murad Mahmudov and ZachXBT: the “meme supercycle” KOL has his $24m memecoin holdings exposed

The central figure - or perhaps the anti-hero - of this controversy is Murad Mahmudov, a former Bitcoin maximalist and fund manager that became a memecoin influencer. His concepts of “meme cults” and “meme supercycle” became hugely popular, and thousands of investors followed his memecoin calls - but recently it was uncovered that he holds $24 million in the memecoins he promotes.

Murad Mahmudov’s own Bitcoin investment fund, Adaptive Capital, failed in 2020, but in mid-2024 he found a new calling as a memecoin KOL. According to Murad, memecoins have their own supercycle, the top of which will come in 2025. He made a sensation talking about the meme supercycle at the Token2049 conference: you can watch the speech here.

According to his philosophy, a memecoin must have a “cult” - a fanatical following - in addition to a few more practical traits:

• launched at least 6 months ago;
• market cap between $5m and $200m (so not DOGE or SHIB, for example);
• launched on Ethereum or Solana, because that’s where whale capital is more likely to flow;
• experienced at least two 70% dumps and survived.

Between June and September 2024, Murad compiled various lists of the top cult memes, which include $POPCAT, $MOG, $RETARDIO, $GIGA, and more.

An interesting twist in this story came when ZachXBT, the best-known “crypto detective” on Twitter, published a list of 11 wallets allegedly belonging to Murad. According to ZachXBT, the purpose is to let Murad’s followers monitor his “future activity” - in other words, to check if he holds large positions in the memes that he promotes, and if he sells any.

Turned out that Mahmudov (if the wallets are indeed his) holds around $24 million in memecoins, including POPCAT, GIGA, MOG, etc. but also smaller memecoins that he bought hours before posting about them, such as MINI.

For some, it was a poor decision on Zach’s part to doxx Murad’s wallets, since it created potential risks to the influencer - who hadn’t been accused of any wrongdoing, after all. But others welcomed Zach’s initiative, since all the information was taken from public on-chain sources (thus obtained legally) and since memecoin investors deserve to know when KOLs have a vested interest.

This story shows that you should always DYOR (do your own research) before following influencers’ meme calls. Of course, it’s difficult to know if a KOL holds a specific new memecoin - and for larger memes, no single influencer has a big enough following to move the price. But if you see an influencer constantly posting about a micro-cap meme, consider that they may be looking to make a profit.

NEIRO cuts ties with market maker Gotbit after fraud allegations by the DOJ

Every serious Web3 project needs to work with a market maker - an entity that makes sure that there is always liquidity to match buy and sell orders. GotBit is one such market maker, particularly active in the memecoin industry, where it used to work with BONK and NEIRO, among others.

“Used to” - because Gotbit is now charged with market manipulation by the US Department of Justice (DOJ), and its major clients are urgently looking for new market makers.

According to the DOJ, Gotbit practiced wash trading - essentially faked volume on tokens by trading with itself in order to artificially increase prices. Wash trading is illegal, though it’s believed to be a very common practice in crypto.

Neiro quickly announced that it was terminating its partnership with Gotbit. However, the same crypto detective ZachXBT then asked why Neiro had been working with Gotbit to begin with, given the market maker’s shady reputation.

Zach also provided screenshots proving that Neiro’s CTO had been aware of the issues with Gotbit before choosing them as their market maker. The CTO responded that Neiro had needed a market maker urgently and Gotbit was the only one that agreed to sign them up.

Of course, Neiro and the others will soon find new market makers - who will probably also engage in the same type of pump-and-dump manipulations. However, this story leads us to another important conclusion: you shouldn’t fully trust the trading volume and price action on meme coins. Those pumps can be engineered through wash trading - and not a result of some organic enthusiasm for the token.

Peanut the Squirrel, Elon Musk, and the impact of viral events: the PNUT controversy

After the death of a popular squirrel called Peanut, a Solana-based meme coin Peanut the Squirrel (PNUT) surged to a $130 million market cap - only to collapse to XXX.

Peanut was the pet of a digital content creator Mark Longo; it had its own Instagram account with 500k followers. Unfortunately, it was confiscated by the authorities after some anonymous complaints - it’s forbidden to keep wild animals as pets in New York, as they could carry the rabies virus.

After being confiscated, Peanut apparently bit someone - and the environmental authorities decided to euthanize the poor squirrel. Its death sparked a wave of anger on social media - and even Elon Musk himself wrote, "The government is a mindless and heartless killing machine."

The creators of $PNUT rode this wave of anger. The token's trading volume surged past $300 million as its price peaked at $0.14. Then, profit-taking kicked in: the market cap is now back to around $45 million, while the price has dropped 70% to $0.04.

The rise and fall of PNUT underscores how susceptible meme coins are to external events and social media influences. The very fact that a successful meme can be based on the death of someone (even if it’s a squirrel) is controversial - don’t you think?

What to know before buying memecoins

1. A meme has a lifecycle

The ultimate winners are those who buy early, soon after the first DEX pools open, and hold until the real pump. Some of these are whales, or large buyers. Often, they are insiders, perhaps even the devs themselves.

Of course, this is also the riskiest time to buy, because most memes dump hard in those first days and never recover. Yet, if you zoom in the chart of a successful meme, you’ll find that the first 10 days have 30-50% pumps and sell-offs, yet they look small in comparison with the main rally.

Next comes the bubble phase as users start feeling the FOMO (fear of missing out). This stage can be short and relentless, with people jumping in on every small dip. During this period, the rally can still be driven by the organic memetic power of the community. Everyone is waiting for a big CEX listing, thinking that it will start “the real pump”.

The reality is usually the opposite: after listing on a large CEX like Binance, most tokens go through sharp sell-offs as early buyers take profits. After this, a strong meme can still go through the cycle again and reach a new ATH - but most won’t.

2. You’re at whales’ mercy

In the initial DEX stage, if whale wallets sell even part of their holdings, the price will collapse: there isn’t enough liquidity to absorb such a large sale. But even in the later CEX stage, large holders and market-makers have the capacity to move the price to the levels where their large orders get filled - and those are usually stop-loss or liquidation levels for regular traders (read here about buy-side and sell-side liquidity).

3. A lot of social media buzz is engineered

For a whale who needs to sell a lot of meme tokens at the top, it can make sense to use paid marketing to attract exit liquidity. One of the methods is to collaborate with influencers. On this  chart from @IncomeSharks, you can see how tweets by notorious influencers like MoonCarl and Crypto Rover appeared around the PEPE blow-off top.  

Another tool is viral hashtags: you can pay for an army of Twitter bots to post tweets with catchy hashtags to make them appear in the Trending section.

4. Don’t expect to make profits without a bot

In the original edition of our guide to memecoins, we talked a lot about MEV (from “maximal extractable value”) bots: algorithms that exploit swaps submitted to the queue by regular users. Together with early whale investors, bot operators were the real winners of the first memecoin wave of 2024. It’s because of their activity that Ethereum transaction fees went up from $2 in December 2022 to $27 at some point.

On Solana, so-called sandwich MEV bots are not a problem, because this blockchain’s technology is different from Ethereum’s in two ways:

1. there is no memepool, so no way for bots to scan the queued transactions and front-run them;
2. it’s not possible to bribe block producers, paying a higher ee to get a transaction processed ahead of others.

Memecoin trading on Solana is still run by bots - but a different kind of bots. These can be Telegram-based retail bots or faster command-line-based tools. Among the best-known are Banana Bot, Trojan, Photon.

Their task is to buy memes fast before they have pumped and to ‘snipe’ new memes. In return, they charge a fee on every trade (for example, 0.9% for Banana Bot). Without using such tools, it’s very difficult to become profitable trading memecoins on Solana: DEXes like Raydium aren’t fast enough (while bots interact directly with pool contracts).

In conclusion

We may still see the memecoin “supercycle” reach a spectacular blow-off top in 2025, with new all-time highs for PEPE, WIF, POPCAT, and others. Who knows?

But remember:  meme tokens have no utility, even when they get listed on a major CEX. They are purely speculative. And while we do not give financial advice, we can remind you of this basic rule: never invest any money that you’re not prepared to lose.

About Pontem

Pontem Network is a product studio building foundational dApps for Aptos. Our products include:

• Pontem Wallet -- the best Aptos wallet
• Lumio L2 - the first VM-agnostic L2 framework
• Liquidswap -- the first DEX (AMM) for Aptos
• $LSD - the official token of Liquidswap DAO
• Move Playground -- a simple browser Move code editor
• Move IntelliJ IDE plugin for developers