These meme coins have outgrown their novelties
By Julia Magas, InvestorPlace Contributor
- Meme coins have entered a steep descent, and it is unclear when the free fall will end.
- Dogwifhat (WIF-USD): The fun approach has helped it gain traction quickly, but does not guarantee consistently high results.
- Shiba Inu (SHIB-USD): When whales reduce their activity with the coin, other players should beware.
- BOOK OF MEMES (BOME-USD): The young token is facing allegations and a related decline in trading volume.
The previous bull run was led by NFTs, which experienced significant growth in 2021. Now, meme coins have come to the forefront, growing out of the internet meme culture and turning into the driving force of the crypto market in 2024. They dominated other cryptos for several weeks. But May revealed some meme coins to avoid.
The latest round of meme coins’ decline has been going on for a week. Yet, most headlines still highlight the investment’s prospects and ignore the actual performance. Only 27% of users have been able to make money trading this category of crypto assets. Everyone else is losing money in anticipation of sky-high profits.
The prolonged price increase has resulted in overbought Solana-based meme coins, which led to a correction phase. Traders’ interest in meme assets is waning. And, they prefer to avoid significant losses from these assets without a solid foundation.
Let’s explore three meme coins to drop like a hot potato.
Dogwifhat (WIF-USD)
Source: shutterstock.com/Sushitsky Sergey
A cryptocurrency starts with its name and image.
A Shiba Inu wearing a pink hat and the joke spelling of “wif” instead of “with” may indicate that the developer isn’t serious. So perhaps the coin is intended for entertainment, not for multimillion-dollar transactions.
If you look at the other details of Dogwifhat (WIF-USD), this opinion is confirmed. The project does not seek technological innovation or social transformation. It perceives itself as a simple meme coin that reached heights due to the general hype.
The meme culture and community activity elevated the coin above its competitors, despite its minimal utility. From February to March of this year, Dogwifhat went from $0.22 to $4.85, i.e., it grew 22 times. As expected from a speculative asset with no technological backing, this record remained unbroken. Relying only on creativity and humor, later on, WIF gave only limited hope for a near-term increase, showing lower and lower peaks on the chart.
The market turbulence hit almost all tokens. But, meme coins suffered the most, dropping to 2.16% of the market. Dogwifhat continued to upset investors, losing 7.5% over the week. The liquidation of long WIF positions reduced the investment portfolio of many traders, but not all of them learned important lessons. The trading volume per day is still measured in hundreds of millions. So, that means that we are waiting for new headlines about meme coins to avoid and affected meme coin investors. The attention dispersion due to the emergence of Catwifhat (CWIF) and Dogwifhat based on Solana only accelerates the movement of the token price to the chart bottom.
Shiba Inu (SHIB-USD)
Source: shutterstock.com/Vectordidak
The success story of Dogecoin (DOGE-USD) inspired other developers to create a similar token that could take a high place in the cryptocurrency ranking. An anonymous founder known as “Ryoshi” brought Shiba Inu (SHIB-USD) to the crypto scene in August 2020. Also, the meme coin revolved around the dog theme and gradually gained a community.
Sadly, SHIB was doomed to fight inflation from the moment of its creation, as the initial issue amounted to almost 1 quadrillion tokens. The massive burning of about 40% by Vitalik Buterin did not solve the issue fundamentally. And, regular actions aimed at reducing the number of coins in circulation continued. These attempts did not stabilize the movement of the token price on the chart, which resulted in high volatility.
The price fluctuations reached their peaks in 2021-2022 when SHIB cost $0.00001-0.00007, and the transition in this range could take a few days. The coin hasn’t reached such heights during the current bull run, and the general downturn among meme coins has hit it hard. From the March level of $0.000035, Shiba Inu has dropped to $0.000021. Another concern is the change in the attitude of the whales, who are reducing their activity. Whales have added Shiba Inu to the list of meme coins to avoid, as the trading volume has dropped from $221 million to $60 million over the past two months.
Book Of Meme (BOME-USD)
Source: shutterstock.com/Jirsak
Book Of Meme (BOME-USD) combines meme culture with the features of decentralized storage to revolutionize the Web3 world. It burst into the crypto world thanks to the hype around memes and crossed the $1 billion point in market cap within the first weeks of its existence. The young project succeeded in pushing out competitors due to its technological sophistication and high expectations from the community.
Taking advantage of meme hype, the project launched its operations on the Solana network. This accelerated the token’s introduction and gave it a boost at the start of development. Now, such a connection is playing against BOME, as the decline in the price of other Solana meme coins is putting pressure on its performance.
The market dynamics of recent weeks have created problems for BOME, reflected in trading interruptions and a decrease in trading volume. As of today, the crisis has not yet gained momentum. The token price has not experienced a significant decline. However, we can confidently say that this is one of the meme coins to avoid. Only two months have passed from the level of $1.4 billion in daily trading volume to the May figure of $114 million.
Additionally, concerns about security vulnerabilities, market manipulation and insider trading allegations are undermining faith in the project. The decline in trading volume and price sentiment over the past few days signal expectations of further downward movement. BOME can postpone the decline only with a sharp increase in social dominance, which is unlikely in the current conditions.
On the date of publication, Julia Magas did not hold (either directly or indirectly) any positions in the securities mentioned in this article. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the writer, subject to the InvestorPlace.com Publishing Guidelines.
Julia Magas is a writer who covers the latest trends in finance and technology. Her work is published in a number of financial media outlets such as Nasdaq, Cointelegraph, Investing, SeekingAlpha, FXEmpire, and Beincrypto. She primarily covers cryptocurrency and blockchain technology with a focus on market performance, innovations and trends.