DOGE, SHIB, PEPE Inspire New Memecoin Surge

A second generation of popular meme coins has emerged. In the past week, tokens, including Doge 2.0 (DOGE2.0), Shiba Inu 2.0 (SHIB2), and Pepe 2.0 (PEPE20), have been listed on the Gate.io and Poloniex exchanges.

But is there anything new about these copycats? And now, do they compare to the OG memecoins they’re named after?

Massive Pump for Meme Coin 2.0 Movement

Recently, PEPE2 has been one of the hottest meme coins. On Friday, PEPE’s younger sibling amassed a market cap of $57.3 million. It also traded at an all-time high of $0.00000022. 

The token’s price is over 200% in seven days.

Another meme coin that has been trending recently is Shiba Inu 2.0. The token hit an all-time high price of $0.00614 on June 29. However, as is often the case in meme coin pumps, it soon fell back down to earth and now trades at around a third of that value.

In the most dramatic pump and dump of the last ten days, Doge 2.0 also hit an all-time high on the same day. But after soaring to $0.00878, its price soon collapsed to below $0.0013.

Gate.io and Poloniex List Second-Gen DOGE, SHIB and PEPE

The rapid rise and fall of the meme coin 2.0 economy may suggest that the craze was just a flash in the pan. But there will certainly be some hodlers out there counting on Friday’s announcements by Gate.io and Poloniex to stimulate further interest in the tokens.

Gate.io revealed that SHIB2 and DOGE2 would be listed on the platform. Meanwhile, Poloniex enabled trading for SHIB2 and PEPE2 on the same day.

Of course, meme coin traders are notoriously fickle. Should the hype surrounding the meme coin 2.0 craze fizzle out by Monday, it wouldn’t be the first time a trend has gone from boom to bust in such a short space of time.

OG Meme Coin Communities Distance Themselves From Copycats

The latest generation of tokens has a lot in common with their predecessors. Primarily, they share a similar visual language and affinity with internet meme culture. But the communities behind the original meme coins being copied aren’t exactly thrilled about the newcomers’ appearance on the scene.

In one tweet, the Dogecoin Foundation sought to distance itself from copycats. It argued that many mislead people into thinking they are affiliated with Dogecoin and prone to scams.

Likewise, in June, the Shiba Inu developer known as Shytoshi Kusama warned followers about potentially fraudulent projects attempting to piggyback off of the Shiba Inu brand. 

There is certainly a precedent for fraudulence among meme coin lookalikes. Previous meme coin trends, such as the wave of “baby” versions of existing tokens, have been subject to various scams. These include rug pulls and other techniques of market manipulation by their developers.

And even those projects that did everything by the book have left many investors burned. In a world where assets can increase their value tenfold or more in a single day but then lose it just as quickly, even seasoned traders need to be careful.