In this digital age, we refuse to take things too seriously until they insist on being taken seriously themselves. Meme coins occupy precisely this awkward posture. They arrived wearing novelty hats, cracked a few jokes, and then stubbornly refused to leave the room.
Dogecoin, the most famous of them all, was never meant to become a fixture of global finance. It launched in 2013 as a mild act of mockery, a playful rebuttal to the earnestness that had begun to surround Bitcoin and its early imitators. Its creators, Jackson Palmer and Billy Markus, wanted to poke fun at the crypto world’s inflated sense of destiny. Instead, they accidentally created one of the most recognisable digital assets of the last decade.
To explain meme coins to the uninitiated is to explain a joke that somehow got out of hand. A meme coin is a cryptocurrency inspired by internet culture, humour, or viral imagery rather than by a clearly defined technical breakthrough. Dogecoin took its identity from a Shiba Inu meme that was already losing its novelty even as the blockchain went live.
And yet, despite its deliberate lack of ambition, it endured. It was easy to use and wrapped in a spirit of friendliness that felt refreshingly unserious. At some point, people stopped laughing at it and started paying attention. If one glances at the Dogecoin price INR on exchanges such as Binance, hovering around ₹12 to ₹13 per token, the absurdity becomes measurable.
From Playful Absurdity to Persistent Presence
Dogecoin’s survival would be interesting enough on its own, but its popularity has grown in ways that make economists rub their temples. India, in particular, has emerged as a fertile ground for meme coin enthusiasm.
A recent analysis of Indian crypto investment trends found that meme-based tokens accounted for more than 13 percent of all cryptocurrency holdings in the country, with Dogecoin among the most widely owned. This is a sizeable portion of a market that includes engineers, students, small business owners, and first-time investors who might otherwise never have touched digital assets.
What these investors are buying is participation in a story. Traditional finance relies on fundamentals like earnings, assets, and economic output. Meme coins rely on belief, repetition, and community.
Their value fluctuates because a joke resurfaced, a celebrity tweeted, or an online forum caught fire. This can feel faintly alarming to those raised on balance sheets and cautionary footnotes. Yet it also reflects something undeniably modern about how meaning and value are formed in the digital age.
Community as Currency
Dogecoin’s real innovation was not technological but social. It cultivated a tone that was deliberately inclusive and faintly ridiculous. Early users tipped each other small amounts for amusing comments or good deeds.
The currency became a way of participating rather than profiting. That sense of collective playfulness built loyalty, and loyalty, it turns out, can be more durable than logic. As Dogecoin communities grew on Reddit and Instagram, and later on X and Telegram, the currency gained resilience through sheer social density.
This is where scepticism rightly enters the room. The Guardian has reported extensively on how meme-driven crypto assets are vulnerable to manipulation, sudden collapses, and speculative frenzies that leave late arrivals nursing losses.
When value is built on enthusiasm rather than infrastructure, it can evaporate just as quickly. The same crowd that lifts a token up can wander off in search of the next distraction. For every Dogecoin that survives, dozens of meme coins vanish quietly, leaving abandoned websites and forlorn Discord servers.
And yet, dismissing meme coins entirely as folly misses the point. They reveal something essential about trust. Not trust in institutions, but trust in one another. People buy meme coins because they believe others will continue to care about them.
This is not so different from how many cultural markets function, whether art, fashion, or even brand loyalty. The difference is that the mechanism is exposed, blinking openly on a blockchain for all to see.
When Institutions Raise an Eyebrow
The moment that truly unsettled the distinction between joke and legitimacy came when institutional finance began to pay attention. In 2025, U.S. regulators approved an exchange-traded product linked to Dogecoin, effectively acknowledging that a memecoin could sit within the architecture of regulated markets. For those who had spent years insisting that Dogecoin was nothing more than an internet prank, this felt like watching a clown quietly put on a suit.
This didn't magically turn Dogecoin into a low-risk investment. Financial Times coverage has been careful to note that volatility remains extreme and long-term value uncertain. But the approval itself mattered symbolically.
It suggested that finance, for all its seriousness, is capable of absorbing cultural phenomena even when they arrive giggling. The line between novelty and legitimacy, once crossed, rarely returns to where it started.
