Meme Coins Surge on the Back of Breakout Baby Hippo Token

It’s a good day to be a degen.

That's especially true if you invested in Moo Deng (MOODENG), the viral coin that's making explosive gains this week, but it isn't only baby pygmy hippo coins that are deep in the green today.

The top 10 meme coins are all up over the past 24 hours, with many notable projects jumping by double-figure percentages. This comes as Solana meme coin factory Pump.fun starts to regain traction following a poor month in which a Tron-based rival threatened its dominance.

Sector leader Dogecoin (DOGE) is up 8% on the day, while second-place token Shiba-Inu (SHIB) has spiked 21%, Solana’s top meme Dogwifhat (WIF) has popped up about 5%, and Ethereum’s Mog Coin (MOG) has jumped 11%. 

Over the past 24 hours, the meme market has been one of the best-performing crypto categories, according to CoinGecko, with such coins rising by nearly 11% on average.

Moo Deng is the biggest winner, as it skyrocketed 34% on the day and 597% over the last week. The token is an homage to a famous baby pygmy hippo from Thailand that has captured the hearts of internet denizens simply for being cute—and that's what meme coins are all about, right?

This meteoric rise makes the hippo-inspired coin currently the largest token launched via Pump.fun in terms of market cap.

In second place on that list is Iggy Azalea’s MOTHER token, which has surged 13% on the day and 121% over the last week. The latest spike comes following the controversial Motherland Rodeo Party in Singapore, where the Australian rapper hired 36 women to dance both onstage and with attendees. Azalea also unveiled plans to launch a crypto casino that blends in social elements with “beautiful women on camera” that players can interact with. 

Other notable winners over the past 24 hours include Donald Trump-related meme coin Maga (TRUMP) skyrocketing 36%, Pepe variant Apu Apustaja (APU) surging by nearly 18%, and Ethereum’s maximalist meme coin HarryPotterObamaSonic10Inu (BITCOIN) up 29%.

While the largest meme coins are in the green, there are also positive signs for the backbone of the meme economy. On Wednesday, token launchpad Pump.fun deployed 10,309 meme coins, according to Dune data. This is the most the protocol has been used to create tokens in a single day for over a month—since August 19.

Pump.fun is the dominant platform for developers to launch new meme coins, and was responsible for the creation of over 20,000 new tokens daily during its peak. It has birthed some of the most popular meme coins of the cycle, including Billy and Church of the Smoking Chicken Fish. 

But when Tron (TRX) launched SunPump, a direct rival to the platform, its popularity dropped. By August 21, SunPump had flipped Pump.fun for total tokens deployed in a day. SunPump’s dominance was short-lived, however, as the protocol has been used to launch less than 1,000 new tokens daily over the last 11 days.

Edited by Andrew Hayward