Meme Coin
Memecoin · Meme token · Joke coin
A coin named after an internet meme, animal or joke and made mostly for fun; its price runs on attention and hype rather than any real use.
Simple explanation
Background: Koreans call them 밈코인, and they draw heavy trading on Korean exchanges: on the November 2024 day Upbit listed PEPE, Dogecoin was Upbit's most traded coin, at more than three times bitcoin's trading value.
A meme is a picture or joke that spreads online, and a meme coin borrows its name and image from one, often an animal or a cartoon character. The best known, Dogecoin (DOGE), was launched in December 2013 by two software engineers as a joke poking fun at the flood of new coins at the time, with the Shiba Inu "Doge" meme as its face. Imitators followed, such as Shiba Inu (SHIB), and later coins built on other memes, such as the frog-themed PEPE.
Most meme coins have no product, business or income behind them. What holds the price up is attention: community buzz, social media and famous names mentioning the coin, so when attention fades the price can drain fast. On February 27, 2025, staff of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said in a statement that typical meme coins are closer to collectibles with little or no use and are not securities. The statement does not cover tokens that merely call themselves meme coins to dodge the law, and it noted that fraud can still be pursued under other laws. This is general information on the US position, not legal advice.
They are very easy to make. Issuing a token on a blockchain costs little, and launch services such as Pump.fun, opened on Solana in January 2024, let anyone create one in a few simple steps; an analysis published in July 2025 counted more than 11.9 million tokens created on that one service. Most never reach a major exchange and are soon forgotten.
The risks are just as large. In a "rug pull", the creators or a handful of wallets holding a big share of the supply sell everything at once and walk away. Fake tokens with the same name as a popular meme coin are common, and since anyone can list a token on a decentralized exchange (DEX), buying by name alone can land you the wrong one. A price below ₩1 looks cheap, but supply often runs to hundreds of billions of coins or more, so judge the coin by market cap, not by the price of one coin. Moves of tens of percent in a day happen, and you can lose most of what you put in.
Korea trades meme coins heavily. Upbit listed BONK in October 2024 and PEPE on November 14, 2024; PEPE reportedly went from about ₩0.018 the day before to ₩0.062 right after the listing, more than tripling, and was back at ₩0.032 by 5 p.m. That same day Dogecoin was Upbit's most traded coin, with ₩4.188 trillion (about $3 billion) traded by 2 p.m., over three times bitcoin's ₩1.3478 trillion (about $960 million). Korean exchanges have reviewed listings under a shared "best practice" since July 19, 2024; with coins that have no identifiable issuer, such as bitcoin, in mind, it lets a coin that has traded for two years or more on a properly regulated overseas market count as meeting some requirements, such as a verified white paper and disclosure.
Korea's market alerts (투자주의, "caution") are not a meme-coin label. They are triggered by numbers: sharp price swings, surges in volume or deposits, a big gap with global prices, or trading concentrated in a few accounts, and any coin that crosses them gets one. No alert does not mean safe either, so for a coin that is moving hard, check the alert on the trading screen and the exchange's notices. Chasing a sudden hype spike can leave you holding a price that collapses soon after.
There is a kimchi premium angle too. Meme coins often trade abroad first and list in Korea later, so right after a Korean listing there are few coins in Korea and the premium easily runs wide; it narrows quickly once coins flow in from abroad. And on a coin so cheap that one price step is several percent of the price, a single step moves the premium by several percentage points, so a price table can make the premium look jumpier than the market really is.
On CoinGaja, Listings and delistings shows the four exchanges' new listings and the caution alerts now on Upbit and Bithumb, by type. The Kimchi premium by coin table marks coins listed less than 24 hours ago as new listings, and hides premiums beyond ±15% as well as premiums that could shift by more than 1 percentage point from tick size alone. The Price and premium heatmap shows meme coins' 24-hour price change and premium, and the Whale Trade Radar shows which coins single fills of ₩5,000,000 (about $3,600) or more are crowding into.
Example
Meme coin A: price ₩0.05 (about $0.000036), circulating supply 1 trillion → market cap = 0.05 × 1 trillion = ₩50 billion (about $36 million)
For the price to reach ₩1, market cap would have to be 1 × 1 trillion = ₩1 trillion (about $714 million) → 20 times today's
With a tick size of ₩0.0001, one step = 0.0001 ÷ 0.05 = 0.20%; with ₩0.001, 2.00% → a single step moves the premium by 2 percentage points
Right after a Korean listing: ₩0.08 in Korea vs ₩0.05 abroad in won → premium = 0.08 ÷ 0.05 − 1 = +60.00% (beyond ±15%, so CoinGaja's tables do not show it)
Buy ₩1,000,000 (about $700) worth at ₩0.08 (1,000,000 ÷ 0.08 = 12.5 million coins), and a few days later the price is ₩0.03 → 12.5 million × 0.03 = ₩375,000 (about $270) (-62.50%)
※ Example numbers, for illustration only
See it on CoinGaja
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