A meme coin issued on Bitcoin’s Runes protocol is nearing a $1 billion market cap after surging 200% over the past 30 days.
The aptly named DOG•GO•TO•THE•MOON (DOG) token spawned on April 20 during the bitcoin halving event. It became “Rune Number 3” and has since become the largest meme coin on Bitcoin and the seventh-largest meme coin across the crypto market. The largest, dogecoin (DOGE), has a market cap of $23 billion.
DOG’s rise comes on the back of a flurry of meme-coin activity with the likes of SHIB, PEPE and FLOKI all adding billions of dollars to their market caps since the start of the year.
While most other meme coins are issued on super-fast blockchains like Solana and Base, DOG is helping establish Runes as a legitimate Bitcoin layer-2 network despite the cumbersome nature of the Bitcoin blockchain.
Runes is essentially a way of making transactions cheaper and faster than the Ordinals Protocol, which embeds data into the Bitcoin blockchain by inscribing information into small Bitcoin-based transactions.
DOG has racked up close to $100 million in trading volume over the past 24 hours as traders begin betting on whether a Bitcoin-based meme coin could emulate the success of established equivalents on other chains.
It’s worth noting that meme coins are highly volatile assets as they ebb and flow based on social media narrative and not on an underlying use case. Following its launch, DOG slumped by more than 60% in three weeks before embarking on its recent rally.