In the bizarre corner of the crypto world where jokes become billion-dollar assets, Dogecoin, Shiba Inu, and PEPE reign supreme. While they all get lumped together as “memecoins,” a look under the hood shows they run on wildly different economic engines.
How they manage their money — the total number of coins, how new ones are made or destroyed, and who got them first — will likely decide which ones survive the hype cycle.
Dogecoin, which started in 2013 as a jab at Bitcoin, has a surprisingly straightforward and endless money supply.
How many coins? There’s no limit. Dogecoin was built without a supply cap, which sets it apart from almost every other major cryptocurrency. Right now, more than 150 billion DOGE are floating around, and that number climbs every single minute. The whole point is to keep the coins plentiful and cheap, encouraging people to spend and tip them rather than hoard them like digital gold.
Making more money – Dogecoin is inflationary, by design. Every minute of every day, miners create a block and are rewarded with 10,000 new DOGE. That adds up to about 5.2 billion new coins a year. While that number is fixed, the overall inflation rate actually drops over time as the total supply grows. This steady drip of new coins is meant to keep transaction fees low and the network humming.
Who got the first coins? Nobody got a head start. Dogecoin had a “fair launch,” meaning the creators didn’t set aside a stash for themselves before releasing it to the public. It has been a project driven by its community and miners from day one.
Popping up in 2020, Shiba Inu called itself the “Dogecoin Killer” and took the exact opposite approach with its supply.
How many coins? SHIB started with a mind-boggling one quadrillion tokens. That’s a 1 with 15 zeros. Today, the number in circulation is closer to 589.5 trillion.
Destroying money – Shiba Inu’s main trick is being deflationary. The community “burns” tokens by sending them to an unusable crypto address, effectively deleting them forever. The most legendary burn happened when the creators sent half the entire supply to Ethereum’s founder, Vitalik Buterin. He turned around and burned over 410 trillion SHIB, instantly wiping out 41% of all the SHIB that would ever exist.
Now, with their own blockchain called Shibarium, token burns are built right into the system. A slice of every transaction fee gets converted to SHIB and destroyed. The goal is simple: make the remaining coins scarcer and, hopefully, more valuable.
Who got the first coins? The launch was a wild marketing stunt. Half the supply was locked into a liquidity pool on the Uniswap exchange, while the other half was sent to Vitalik Buterin. It was a massive gamble that created instant buzz and put the coin’s fate partially in the hands of a crypto icon.
PEPE jumped into the fray in April 2023, riding the fame of the “Pepe the Frog” meme to instant stardom. Its economic model is a hybrid of what came before it.
How many coins? PEPE has a hard cap of 420.69 trillion tokens, and almost all of them are already out in the wild.
Destroying money: Like Shiba Inu, PEPE is also deflationary. A small piece of every transaction is burned, slowly chipping away at the total supply. The project is built on the idea of creating scarcity over time. Still, the community has raised eyebrows at times, questioning whether some tokens claimed to be burned were actually put back into play.
Who got the first coins? PEPE launched with no early sale for insiders and charges no transaction tax. The founders sent 93.1% of the tokens straight to a Uniswap liquidity pool and then threw away the keys by burning the provider tokens. The remaining 6.9% sits in a wallet controlled by multiple people, earmarked for things like getting listed on major exchanges.
Ultimately, these three coins tell very different stories. Dogecoin wants to be a currency that’s always being printed and spent. Shiba Inu and PEPE are betting their futures on a high-stakes game of elimination, hoping that by destroying their own supply, they’ll make what’s left priceless. Which strategy wins out depends as much on internet culture as it does on these economic blueprints.
That electrifying dream of a crypto, bought for fractions of a penny, one day hitting a single dollar fuels a massive part of the market. It’s a powerful story. Unfortunately, for many popular coins, this dream crashes into the unfeeling wall of basic arithmetic. The sheer amount of money required to push some of these tokens to $1 isn’t just unlikely; it’s a mathematical fantasy.
Let’s do the math that many prefer to ignore. A coin’s market capitalization is its price multiplied by the number of coins in circulation. For a crypto’s price to hit $1, its market cap has to equal its circulating supply.
Here’s what that looks like for some popular names, based on their current coin counts –
Coin counts change, but these numbers paint the picture.
Those figures in the table might seem abstract, so let’s weigh them against things that actually exist in the global economy.
Right now, the entire world’s cryptocurrency market is worth about $4.06 trillion. Bitcoin alone makes up more than half of that.
Now for the really big players –
When you see it this way, the absurdity becomes clear. For Shiba Inu to reach $1, it would need a market cap of $589 trillion. That isn’t just more than all the crypto in the world; it’s more than four times the value of every single stock on the planet combined. It’s an impossible figure.
PEPE would require $421 trillion, another sum that dwarfs the entire global economy.
Even Dogecoin, a more established player, would need to be worth $143 billion. That’s not impossible, but it would catapult it into the highest echelon of crypto projects, making it more valuable than giants like Starbucks or Boeing.
The wild price swings of memecoins have almost nothing to do with technology or business plans. These assets, born from internet jokes, are tethered directly to the chaotic energy of social media. Their fortunes are dictated by Elon Musk’s late-night tweets, the mob mentality of Reddit forums, and the powerful human impulse to not miss out on the next big thing.
A single post can create a millionaire, while a shift in online mood can cause a total collapse, leaving financial watchdogs struggling to figure out the rules of this new game.
Dogecoin is the original and best case study. Created as a joke in 2013, it sat quietly for years before Elon Musk decided it was his favorite cryptocurrency. His unpredictable and often bizarre tweets became rocket fuel for DOGE’s price.
On 2 April 2019, his simple tweet that Dogecoin “might be my fav cryptocurrency” triggered a massive spike in attention and value. This happened again and again through 2020 and 2021. The peak of this madness was his appearance on Saturday Night Live in May 2021.
In the run-up, the hype pushed DOGE to its all-time high of around 74 cents. When he called it a “hustle” on live television, the price cratered. This proves the terrifying power of a single influencer in a market running purely on vibes.
While one powerful person can light the fuse, it often takes a dedicated mob to keep the fire burning. Shiba Inu (SHIB) is proof. Its incredible surge in 2021 wasn’t started by a celebrity, but by a sprawling, leaderless group of online believers calling themselves the “Shib Army.”
On platforms like Reddit and Twitter, this community churned out a non-stop flood of memes and pro-SHIB propaganda. This relentless online campaign created a powerful sense of tribe and a shared mission, which translated into a tidal wave of buying pressure.
At one point, SHIB rocketed by over 1,500% in just a few weeks – A rally driven almost entirely by this community-made hype.
The strategies that worked for DOGE and SHIB are now standard practice for a whole new generation of memecoins.
The common denominator is a complete dependence on social media to build momentum. The value isn’t in a product; the value is the hype.
This entire system works because it taps into raw human psychology. The fear of missing out (FOMO) is a potent force. When you see a coin’s price go vertical on a chart, surrounded by a storm of excited tweets, the instinct to buy in before it’s too late can be overwhelming.
Beyond FOMO, these coins offer a sense of identity. Buying SHIB makes you part of the Shib Army.
It’s like joining a club with its own inside jokes and shared enemies. This tribal feeling can be strong enough to make people hold on through brutal price drops, convinced their team will eventually win.
This Wild West of promotion hasn’t gone unnoticed. The U.S Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has started cracking down, warning celebrities that they must disclose if they are paid to promote a crypto asset. They’ve already fined Kim Kardashian and former NBA star Paul Pierce for shilling a coin called EthereumMax without revealing they were paid endorsers.
This signals a new era where influencers can no longer pretend their posts are just casual observations.
The future of memecoin hype will likely get weirder and more complex. New decentralized social media platforms could create even more insular and passionate crypto tribes. At the same time, investors might slowly get better at telling the difference between a real grassroots movement and a carefully manufactured marketing campaign.
However, as long as the internet can create a viral sensation overnight, the digital pied pipers will have the power to control the incredible, and incredibly dangerous, fortunes of memecoins.
Dogecoin, Shiba Inu, and PEPE all started as speculative gambles wrapped in a meme. Now, they represent a broader movement of joke coins trying to justify their existence with real-world purpose.
Dogecoin’s path is one of simple, widespread use. Shiba Inu is taking the ambitious route of building a self-contained economy from scratch. PEPE is still figuring it out, leaning on its cultural power while it searches for a technical one.
Whether they succeed will be the ultimate test of whether a joke can grow up and get a real job in the new digital world.
