Famous coins and what they teach
Dogecoin, Bonk, Pepe, dogwifhat, Moo Deng, Fartcoin, HAWK, TRUMP and LIBRA: what really happened, with dates, and the lesson in each.
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You'll hear these names again and again. Each one taught the trenches something. The numbers come from news reports and on-chain studies at the time. Prices change every minute, so treat every figure as a snapshot from its date.
| Coin | Launched | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| Dogecoin (DOGE) | Dec 2013 | A joke by two engineers, on its own blockchain. Still worth about $12.4 billion in October 2026. |
| Shiba Inu (SHIB) | Aug 2020 | An Ethereum token made by an anon called Ryoshi. Half the supply went to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, who burned about 410 trillion tokens in May 2021. |
| Bonk (BONK) | Dec 25, 2022 | Made to cheer up Solana's community after the FTX collapse. Half the supply was given free to Solana users. |
| Pepe (PEPE) | Apr 2023 | An Ethereum token. Passed $1.6 billion in under three weeks, then fell back to about half. |
| dogwifhat (WIF) | Nov 2023 | A dog in a knitted hat. Peaked near $4.7 billion on March 31, 2024. |
| Moo Deng (MOODENG) | Sep 2024 | Named after a baby pygmy hippo at a zoo in Thailand. Passed $70 million in two weeks. |
| Goatseus Maximus (GOAT) | Oct 10, 2024 | Launched by an anon and cheered on by Truth Terminal, an AI bot account on X. Started a wave of AI coins and peaked near $1.3 billion in November 2024. |
| Fartcoin | Oct 2024 | A fart joke born from the same AI bot's posts. Passed $1 billion in December 2024. |
| HAWK | Dec 4, 2024 | A celebrity coin. Bubblemaps found about 96% of the supply had gone to one cluster of linked wallets. It hit about $490 million within minutes of launch, then fell more than 90% within hours. |
| TRUMP | Jan 17, 2025 | The US president's official coin. Near $75 two days later, close to $15 billion. About $1.78 in July 2026. |
| LIBRA | Feb 14, 2025 | Posted by Argentina's president. Peaked around $4.5 billion, then crashed about 90% within hours. |
Lesson 1: the long-lived ones started as jokes with a wide crowd
DOGE, BONK and WIF share a pattern: a meme people genuinely liked, lots of holders spread out, and time. BONK gave half its supply away instead of keeping it for insiders. That is the opposite of most launches you will see.
Lesson 2: a famous name is not protection
HAWK, TRUMP and LIBRA had huge names behind them. That made them more dangerous, not less. People close to each launch held a big share or got in first, sniper bots were waiting, and much of the crowd arrived near the top. On LIBRA, wallets linked to the team cashed out about $107 million within hours, according to the on-chain tracker Lookonchain. Nansen later found that 86% of the LIBRA traders it studied lost money, about $251 million in total.
Lesson 3: being right about the meme isn't enough
Buying TRUMP at the top
TRUMP was the most famous memecoin of its year. Here is what the top looked like.
- Step 1: On January 19, 2025, TRUMP traded near $75.
- Step 2: $1,000 at $75 buys about 13.3 tokens.
- Step 3: In early July 2026 it traded near $1.78. 13.3 × $1.78 is about $23.70.
- Step 4: That's a loss of about 97.6%.
- Step 5: Nansen counted 988,905 wallets in loss on TRUMP by the end of June 2026, about two-thirds of everyone who bought, with $3.81 billion in combined losses. The gains went mostly to early buyers who got in during the first hours, below $1.
Lesson 4: you only hear about the winners
You know WIF because it won. You don't know the thousands of dog-in-a-hat coins that died the same month. This is survivorship bias: the winners tell their story, the losers go quiet. Every famous coin on this page had copies, and almost all of the copies went to zero.
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This guide is for learning. It is not financial advice. Most memecoins go to zero and most people who trade them lose money. Only ever trade what you can afford to lose.