What is a meme coin?

What makes a coin a meme coin

Bitcoin and Ether started as projects with a job: sending money, running programs. A meme coin starts with a joke, a picture or something everyone's talking about. Dogecoin began as a parody of Bitcoin with a Shiba Inu dog on it, and it still trades today. Most new meme coins start on pump.fun, where anyone can make one in under a minute.

Every meme coin has the same few parts:

• A name, a ticker and a picture. Anyone can reuse them, which is why copycats exist.
• A CA. Its unique contract address on the blockchain, the one part nobody can copy.
• A supply. Every pump.fun coin starts with 1 billion tokens.
• Nothing behind it. No company, no product, no earnings, no dividends.

Meme coins against stocks

A share is a slice of a company: its products, its customers, its profits. People argue about what a company is worth, but there's something to measure. A meme coin is a slice of attention. There's no business to measure, so its price is whatever buyers and sellers do with it, from one minute to the next.

How a meme coin starts on pump.fun

On pump.fun, you give a coin a name, a ticker and a picture, connect a Solana wallet and approve one transaction. There's no platform fee to create it, no presale and no team allocation: nobody gets tokens for free, the creator included. The coin is live in seconds, and the first trade can happen straight away.

A new coin sells on a bonding curve: a price rule where every buy raises the price and every sell lowers it. When about 85 SOL has gone in, for a coin paired with SOL, the coin graduates to PumpSwap, pump.fun's exchange, and trades there from then on.

Why a tiny price isn't a small coin

Most pump.fun coins trade at a fraction of a cent, so they look cheap. A low price only means a big supply. Every pump.fun coin starts with 1 billion tokens, so a coin at $0.0003 a token is worth $300,000 in total. The number that tells you a coin's size is its market cap: its price times its supply.

The same math works the other way. "It only has to get to $1" sounds modest, but a pump.fun coin at $1 a token would be worth $1 billion.

Stock, meme coin or both?

Six things people say about stocks and meme coins. Put each where it belongs.

• Owns a slice of a company StockMeme coinBoth
• Anyone can create one in a minute StockMeme coinBoth
• Its price is what buyers and sellers agree on StockMeme coinBoth
• Has earnings you can look up StockMeme coinBoth
• Is known by its CA StockMeme coinBoth
• Can lose all its value StockMeme coinBoth

What moves a meme coin's price

• Attention. A post that spreads, a trend, a livestream. New buyers push the price up, and when they lose interest, it falls.
• The curve. On pump.fun, every buy raises the price and every sell lowers it, on a fixed formula.
• Big holders. A wallet that bought a big stack early can sell it all at once. That's how most rug pulls on pump.fun work.
• SOL itself. Most coins are priced in SOL, so when SOL's dollar price moves, theirs does too. That's the coin's trading pair at work.

Why people buy them

For the fun, the community and the small chance of a big move. A coin that catches on can multiply in hours. A coin with nothing behind it can also fall to almost nothing just as fast, and most new coins never catch on. Put in only what you'd be fine losing in full.

Before you buy one

1. Get the CA from the project itself. Its X profile, pinned post or website. Copycats called vamps copy the name and picture, never the CA.
2. Check who holds the supply. If a few wallets hold a big share, they can sell it on you.
3. Set your slippage. On a busy coin, the price moves between your click and your fill. Slippage tolerance caps how much worse you'll accept.
4. Spend only what you can lose. Then enjoy the ride.

A meme coin can have a job too

Some meme coins add a reason to hold beyond the meme. $NTRNDM, our own coin, is one: our revenue buys it back, and our launch fees buy it back and burn it. It started on pump.fun like any other coin, with a CA that starts with its ticker.

Thinking of making one? A coin whose CA spells its name is easier to trust and harder to copy. Pick your word, and launch on pump.fun with one wallet approval.

Questions