While some have made fortunes in cryptocurrencies by building and understanding the complicated technologies that enable the blockchain and digital currencies, others have made possibly greater fortunes by simply buying every coin associated with a dog.
In fact, some of these "meme" coins have delivered far better returns than the coins with the biggest market caps that are starting to be traded and accumulated by major institutions. Of course, the most well-known example is dogecoin.
Dogecoin
Dogecoin was created by software engineers, Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer, as a "joke" to mock the wild speculation that was happening in cryptocurrencies in 2013. Dogecoin was originally trading at a couple of thousandths of a penny, although it would trend higher along with other altcoins during periods of frenzy in crypto markets.
At some point, a meme developed predicting that dogecoin would hit $1 which implied a value of over $100 billion. None other than Elon Musk and Mark Cuban became proponents of dogecoin, pointing to its lack of fixed supply a feature and a differentiator from bitcoin and ethereum.
The coin did hit a high of $0.71 when Elon Musk hosted SNL but dropped rapidly after that. Currently, it's trading around $0.27 with a total market cap of $35 billion.
Shiba Inu Coin
Shiba Inu is another meme coin that features the breed of dog used as a mascot for dogecoin. Many have accused the coin as being part of a 'pump and dump' scheme as large swathes of the coin are held by a handful of wallets.
However, that hasn't stopped it from being one of the best-performing coins in history in such a short period of time. It even briefly eclipsed dogecoin in value in terms of the total market cap which is an absurd sentence to write.
It started trading at one-billionth of a penny and is now at 50,000th of a penny which is a 3.5 million percent gain. And this is after a nearly 40% decline in its price.
FlokiCoin
Another meme coin is Floki Inu which is named after Elon Musk's dog. This coin is up 7,335% since its debut in July of this year. So far, it's underperformed Shiba Inu but let's see if it can catch up to its dog-coin brethren.