Meme coins explained: how Dogecoin, Shiba Inu and Pepe began

Dogecoin started as a joke in December 2013. Shiba Inu sent half its supply to Vitalik Buterin, and Pepe put almost all of its tokens into a trading pool on day one. Together these three meme coins were worth about $16 billion on 5 November, according to CoinGecko. Their launch rules still set how many tokens exist and who holds them.

Dogecoin: a joke with its own blockchain

Billy Markus, then an engineer at IBM, and Jackson Palmer of Adobe launched Dogecoin on 6 December 2013. They put the Shiba Inu dog from a popular internet meme on the coin, and Markus built it on Litecoin’s code. In 2014 holders raised DOGE to send the Jamaican bobsleigh team to the Winter Olympics in Sochi. Both founders had left the project by 2015.

Dogecoin has no supply cap. Miners create 10,000 DOGE with every block, about 5 billion coins a year, and 156.6 billion now circulate. DOGE peaked at $0.7316 in May 2021, the week Elon Musk hosted Saturday Night Live. At $0.073 it trades 90% below that record.

Shiba Inu: half the supply to Buterin

An anonymous developer called Ryoshi created Shiba Inu in August 2020 as a token on Ethereum, with a supply of one quadrillion SHIB. Ryoshi sent half of it to the wallet of Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin. In May 2021 Buterin burned about 410 trillion of those tokens, then worth roughly $6.7 billion, and gave most of the rest to a Covid relief fund in India.

SHIB hit its record of $0.00008616 in October 2021. The team later added ShibaSwap, a decentralised exchange, and in August 2023 its own network, Shibarium. SHIB trades about 95% below its peak, with 589 trillion tokens in circulation.

Pepe: no share for the team

PEPE launched on Ethereum in April 2023 with no presale and no tax on trades. Its anonymous creators put 93.1% of the 420.69 trillion tokens into a liquidity pool on Uniswap, burned the pool tokens and gave up control of the contract. PEPE passed $1 billion in market cap within weeks. Binance listed it on 5 May 2023 and warned users that the token had no utility.

In August 2023 the team’s shared wallet sent about 16 trillion PEPE to exchanges, and the remaining founder blamed three former members. PEPE set its record of $0.00002803 on 9 December 2024 and now trades 83% lower.

Three sets of rules

• Dogecoin runs its own blockchain, relies on miners and has no limit on supply;
• Shiba Inu is a fixed-supply token on Ethereum, and burns shrink it;
• Pepe is a fixed-supply token on Ethereum that kept no share for its team at launch.

What it means for you

No product pays holders of a meme coin, so buyers pay for attention and trading volume. Before you buy one, read its supply rules. A Dogecoin holder faces about 5 billion new coins every year. SHIB and PEPE holders deal with fixed supplies and with large wallets that can sell at once. Our guides to Dogecoin, Shiba Inu and Pepe follow each coin from launch to today, with a calculator for past prices.

Prices as of 5 November 2026, from CoinGecko. Meme coins can lose most of their value within days. This is not investment advice.