Shiba, Doge, and the Coins That Turned Memes Into Mortgages: A Ridiculous History of Meme Coin Winners

Let's be honest: nobody in 2013 expected a coin featuring a grammatically challenged dog to one day be worth billions of dollars in aggregate market cap. And yet, here we are. The meme coin sector is now a legitimate (and legitimately chaotic) corner of the crypto universe, complete with its own hall of fame, hall of shame, and a very long list of people who sold too early.

At BestCoinBonk, we believe in tracking it, trading it, and yes—meme-ing it into existence. But we also believe in understanding how the magic has actually happened before. So buckle up, because this is the story of the meme coins that actually made people money, and the lessons buried inside all that absurdity.

The OG: Dogecoin and the Power of Being First to the Joke

Dogecoin launched in December 2013 as a literal parody. Software engineers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer slapped the Shiba Inu meme on a Litecoin fork and called it a day. The joke? That crypto was getting too serious. The punchline? It worked.

For most of its early life, DOGE traded at fractions of a cent. Communities on Reddit used it to tip content creators. It funded the Jamaican bobsled team. It was wholesome, goofy, and completely unserious—which, paradoxically, made it resilient. There was no VC-backed roadmap to disappoint. No whitepaper promises to break. It was just vibes and a dog.

Then Elon Musk happened. Between 2020 and 2021, a series of tweets from the world's most chaotic billionaire sent DOGE from under a cent to a peak of around $0.73 in May 2021. Early holders who bought at $0.001 and held through that peak were sitting on returns exceeding 70,000%. That's not a typo. That's the kind of number that makes financial advisors develop stress-related eye twitches.

The lesson from DOGE isn't "buy whatever Elon tweets about." It's that a coin with genuine community staying power—one that people actually like for reasons beyond profit—has a far better shot at surviving long enough to catch a catalyst.

Shiba Inu: The Copycat That Ate the Original's Lunch (Briefly)

If Dogecoin was the blueprint, Shiba Inu was the blueprint xeroxed, laminated, and sold at a markup. Launched in August 2020 by an anonymous creator named "Ryoshi," SHIB leaned hard into the Dogecoin aesthetic while adding DeFi mechanics, a built-in decentralized exchange (ShibaSwap), and an absolute mountain of hype.

The tokenomics were... aggressive. One quadrillion tokens. Half were sent to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin's wallet as a publicity stunt—a move that backfired spectacularly when Vitalik donated tens of billions of dollars worth of SHIB to COVID relief in India and burned the rest, crashing the price overnight. Chaotic? Absolutely. Somehow still recoverable? Also yes.

SHIB peaked in October 2021 at around $0.000088, delivering returns of over 40,000,000% from its launch price to those who held through the run. Let that number settle in. Forty. Million. Percent. The people who turned $100 into millions are the reason your uncle keeps telling you to "get into crypto."

What separated SHIB from the thousands of instant rug-pulls that launched the same week? Community infrastructure. The team built actual products. They created an NFT platform, a metaverse project, and a layer-2 blockchain. Whether those projects delivered on their promises is a separate debate—but the effort to build something kept retail believers on board long enough for the price to do something extraordinary.

The Anatomy of a Meme Coin Winner vs. a Slow-Motion Disaster

Here's the uncomfortable truth: for every DOGE and SHIB, there are approximately ten thousand coins with names like SafeElon2000Inu that evaporated within 72 hours. The difference between a winner and a pump-and-dump often comes down to a few key signals:

Liquidity lock status. Legitimate projects lock their liquidity pool tokens so developers can't pull the funds and disappear. Check tools like Team.Finance or Unicrypt before touching anything. If liquidity isn't locked, you are the exit liquidity.

Token distribution. If one wallet holds 40% of the supply, that wallet owner controls your financial fate. Decentralized distribution—spread across thousands of holders—dramatically reduces the risk of a single actor tanking the price.

Organic community vs. paid hype. Real meme coin communities are chaotic, creative, and relentlessly online in a way that feels authentic. Astroturfed Telegram groups with bot-generated messages and copy-paste hype are a different animal entirely. Your gut, surprisingly, is often right here.

A reason to exist beyond "number go up." The surviving meme coins always had a cultural hook—a story, a mascot, a community identity. DOGE had the wholesome tipping culture. SHIB had the underdog narrative of beating the original. BONK had the Solana ecosystem revival story baked in from day one.

BONK and the Solana Renaissance

Speaking of BONK—launched on Christmas Day 2022, right in the smoldering wreckage of the FTX collapse—this little Solana-native meme coin did something remarkable. It airdropped tokens directly to Solana NFT holders, developers, and community members, injecting life into an ecosystem that many had declared dead.

The timing was either genius or insane, and possibly both. BONK became a symbol of the Solana community's refusal to go quietly. By early 2024, it had pumped thousands of percent from its launch price, minted a new class of meme coin believers, and gave this very website its name. We're not biased. We're just grateful.

Your Framework for Spotting the Next One

We're not going to tell you the next DOGE is sitting in some Telegram channel right now, because honestly, it might be—or it might be a trap. What we can offer is a checklist that separates the serious contenders from the noise:

1. Is the liquidity locked? Non-negotiable.
2. Does the community have a genuine personality? Memes should be funny, not desperate.
3. Is there a cultural narrative? Not just hype, but a story people want to be part of.
4. Are the token holders reasonably distributed? Check on-chain data. It takes five minutes.
5. Is there a catalyst on the horizon? Exchange listings, ecosystem integrations, or mainstream media attention can all serve as rocket fuel.

None of this is financial advice. All of this is pattern recognition from a website named after a meme coin that launched during a crypto apocalypse and somehow thrived. Take that for whatever it's worth.

The meme coin market is equal parts lottery and social experiment. The winners aren't always the smartest players—sometimes they're just the ones who bought the dog picture and forgot to sell. But understanding the history at least gives you a fighting chance of being in the right place when the next ridiculous, improbable, absolutely real wealth event happens.

Track it. Trade it. Meme it into existence. Just maybe check if the liquidity is locked first.