What are Meme Coins?
Meme coins are cryptocurrencies that are created based on some popular internet memes or humorous characteristics, with no specific purpose or use case. They are created just for fun and entertainment purposes and hold no inherent value. However, they became quite popular in recent years capitalizing on the hype of the internet memes.
Being the first-ever meme coin, Dogecoin started the meme coin trend and today they became an inseparable part of the crypto ecosystem with billions of dollars worth market cap. Some of the top meme coins are Dogecoin (DOGE), Shiba Inu (SHIB), Pepe coin (PEPE), Bone ShibaSwap (BONE), etc. While most of these are started as memes, they are growing into actual cryptocurrencies with specific use cases.
For example, dog-themed meme coin Dogecoin is being used for making online payments and the second-best meme coin, Shiba Inu is building an entire ecosystem of protocols including a decentralized exchange, ShibaSwap, a layer2 blockchain, Shibarium, and SHIB metaverse.
Meme coins have also taken up various narratives such as AI meme coins and cat themed meme coins. With the increased adoption of Meme Coins, some of the recent meme coin presaleshave become immensely popular
What are Altcoins?
Altcoins are all the alternative cryptocurrencies to Bitcoin. So, except for Bitcoin, every cryptocurrency can be referred to as an altcoin. In fact, meme coins are a part of altcoins but not vice versa. Some people in the crypto community prefer to call all cryptocurrencies, other than Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH), as altcoins.
The first-ever altcoin was “Namecoin” and it was created as a hard fork from Bitcoin, to insert data into the Bitcoin blockchain. The cryptocurrencies that exist today such as Litecoin (LTC), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), and Bitcoin Gold (BTG) are also the hard forks of Bitcoin. Other cryptocurrencies that have their own blockchain and were created with specific use cases such as Ethereum (ETH), Polkadot (DOT), Cardano (ADA), Ripple (XRP), are also altcoins.
