What Is a Meme Coin?

A meme coin is a crypto asset themed on an internet joke, character, news event or passing trend, launched to gather an online crowd that trades it. The appeal is cultural, not functional: the price is whatever that crowd will pay at a given moment.

Dogecoin is the usual reference point. Its project history gives December 6, 2013 as the launch date and says two developers made it as a joke because cryptocurrency seemed to be taken too seriously. Names that followed, such as Shiba Inu and Pepe, kept the playful branding. Pepe's own website describes its token as entertainment with no intrinsic value and no expectation of financial return.

Most crypto assets point to a function. Bitcoin is a payment network whose supply is capped at 21 million coins (bitcoin.org), and a stablecoin is built to hold the value of a currency. A meme coin usually makes no such promise. The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) describes meme coins as having limited or no functionality, though holders sometimes invent small uses, such as chat-room access.

Supply rules differ from one project to the next, so the label says nothing about scarcity. Dogecoin has no fixed maximum and issues about 5 billion new coins a year (10,000 per block), with no end date (dogecoin.com). Pepe's website states a total supply of 420,690,000,000,000 tokens. Each project has to be read on its own terms.

Because anyone can write a smart contract and deploy it to the network (ethereum.org), a new meme token needs no one's permission to exist.

Very little. A price per coin depends on how many coins exist, so it says nothing about the size of the project or its total value. The figure that reflects size is the price multiplied by the number of coins outstanding.

On October 12, 2026 at 02:43 Istanbul time, Lzzo.com showed Pepe at $0.00000421 and Shiba Inu at $0.00000549. Those look small, yet Pepe's stated supply of 420.69 trillion tokens puts the full stated amount at about $1.77 billion. The reverse trap exists too: a million Shiba Inu is only $5.49. The worked example below shows both.

Because the price rests on attention. The SEC says the value of these assets is driven by supply and demand rather than by the work of a business, and its 2025 staff statement adds speculation. Lzzo.com's Dogecoin page notes that its price may respond more to social media, posts by public figures and general risk appetite than to technical use.

Thin trading makes moves larger. The stock-paired meme coins on Lzzo.com trade in pools, and the list page warns that a pool can hold little liquidity relative to its price moves. On October 12, 2026, the 24-hour swap counts on 22 of the 23 coin pages ranged from 21 to 888. With so few trades, a price move can reflect a handful of orders rather than broad demand.

Meme coins can lose most or all of their value, and some losses come from deliberate schemes rather than ordinary market moves. The points below come from regulator and developer documentation.

• Pump and dump. The SEC's investor education office warned in 2024 that fraudsters may create a memecoin, tout it on social media and sell before the hype ends. The price then falls rapidly and other buyers typically lose most of their money.
• Lookalike tokens. Names and symbols can be copied, so ethereum.org advises checking a token's contract address with the organization behind it. In its test, a small purchase moved a copycat's price by more than 90%, while the genuine token barely moved.
• Irreversible actions. Interactions with smart contracts cannot be undone (ethereum.org). Token approvals can be unlimited, do not expire and keep working after a wallet is disconnected until the holder revokes them.
• No claim on cash flow. Lzzo.com's Shiba Inu page says SHIB gives no claim on any company's income, cash flows or assets, and Pepe's website says there is no expectation of financial return.
• Unclear projects. On October 12, 2026, 9 of the 23 stock-paired coin pages on Lzzo.com said no verifiable official website was found.

On March 17, 2026, the SEC, with guidance from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, published a final interpretation that sorts crypto assets into five groups: digital commodities, digital collectibles, digital tools, stablecoins and digital securities (sec.gov). It uses a meme coin as its example of a digital collectible, says such assets are typically acquired for artistic, entertainment, social and cultural reasons, and says a digital collectible is not itself a security. The same release lists Dogecoin and Shiba Inu among its examples of digital commodities, so the meme label alone does not decide how an asset is classified. It took effect on March 23, 2026 and supersedes earlier statements by the Commission or its staff.

It followed a February 27, 2025 staff statement from the SEC's Division of Corporation Finance, which said fraud involving meme coins may still be pursued by other federal or state agencies. The 2026 release adds that a coin first sold as a meme coin can later become a digital commodity if it becomes functional within a system.

Securities-law classification is a separate question from whether a coin is safe, fairly priced or honestly run. This guide is educational, is not a legal opinion and covers only the United States; rules in other countries differ and can change.

No. Lzzo.com's stock-paired list covers meme coins whose main liquidity pool is set against a tokenized stock or ETF token instead of a dollar token. The coin is not a real-world asset: it represents no share, metal or other asset, and the pool is its only link to the paired token. These coins are created by independent parties, not by the company behind the stock or by the issuer of the tokenized product.

A coin is listed only when its pool is verified on-chain, the pool is at least 14 days old and it meets minimum liquidity and trading-activity rules. On October 12, 2026, the list held 23 coins, with pool ages from 28 to 89 days, and entries were last reviewed on October 4, 2026. Being listed does not mean approval, and the coins may lose all of their value.

The stock-paired list and a meme filter on the main crypto list are linked below. Dogecoin, Shiba Inu and Pepe have their own pages with a price in US dollars and an observation time. On October 12, 2026 at 02:43 Istanbul time, Dogecoin showed $0.0866.

Stock-paired coins are priced in the paired token, with a dollar value on some pages. A listing does not mean approval. The methodology page explains how prices and calculations are produced.