Are you planning to launch a memecoin?
A memecoin is generally a fungible digital asset on the blockchain minted to represent a popular or humorous meme on the internet. Many buy such an asset to participate in a community and culture that emerges around the meme or simply for fun.
CoinMarketCap lists about 3000 memecoins and estimates the market to be worth over $50 billion. Meanwhile, other sources have estimated that over 50,000 memecoins are minted daily, and the market has an annual growth of nearly 50%.
A decade ago, when Dogecoin, the first ever memecoin, launched, the only options for creating a memecoin were to hard fork an existing blockchain and use the new branch or build an entire blockchain network from scratch.
Both these options require extensive and highly polished coding skills.
Today, fortunately, several blockchains have been built as platforms on which anyone who wants to can mint memecoins and put them on exchanges to be traded.
Indeed, many of these blockchains are integrated with memecoin generators, which are interfaces where you simply input critical details about the memecoin, such as the name, the amount, and how much each coin can be subdivided. With these details, the generator automatically writes the smart contract and launches it on the blockchain on your behalf. You do not need to know how to program.
However, the list of blockchains and memecoin generators from which to choose is growing longer with time, and this might make it difficult for you to decide on which one to use for your memecoin.
Key Factors for Choosing a Blockchain for Your Memecoin
The factors that should guide you in choosing a blockchain include the following:
Speed of transaction confirmation.
The speed at which a transaction is confirmed with finality is generally determined by the transaction throughput of the network. The fewer transactions a blockchain network confirms in a second, the longer it takes to confirm a transaction. The larger a network’s throughput, the more ideal it is for hosting a memecoin.
The cost of transaction confirmation.
Users of blockchain networks pay fees to incentivize the miners to process transactions and maintain the shared ledger. However, the higher the cost a user has to pay to have a memecoin transaction processed, the less ideal the network is for launching a memecoin.
Token holders and traders prefer assets they spend low fees to move from one wallet to another. Generally, blockchains with larger transaction throughput charge lower network fees.
The ease of use
It is critical to consider how easy it is for developers and token holders (buyers and traders of the asset) to use a particular blockchain ecosystem.
The most difficult option for developers is to build a new blockchain for the memecoin. That means writing the core protocol from scratch and encouraging people to download and run it, thus creating a new network.
The easiest option is to find an already set-up blockchain complete with a running network. You only need to write and execute a smart contract for your particular memecoin.
Ecosystem infrastructure
It is also important that the blockchain you choose to use has an elaborate ecosystem with all the necessary tools and interoperabilities. If you choose to build a new blockchain, you might also be expected to build critical infrastructures for token holders, such as wallets and exchange platforms.
If you prefer choosing an existing blockchain, choose one with intuitive wallets and exchanges and enough liquidity pairs for end users to have a seamless experience.
Blockchains that host memecoins.
The following are the blockchain options you have if you are planning to launch a memecoin and how they fair, based on the metrics we have established.
The Ethereum core chain (L1)
The Ethereum network was the first blockchain to provide the option that did not need building an entire ecosystem from scratch to launch a memecoin.
On Ethereum, you can write a smart contract and implement it on its Virtual Machine (EVM). The already established network takes care of the consensus mechanisms and provides the rest of the necessary infrastructure, such as wallet and exchange protocols.
The third and fourth memecoins with the largest market capitalizations, according to CoinMarketCap, that is Shiba Inu ($10 billion), and Pepe ($4 billion), are hosted directly on the Ethereum blockchain.
Ethereum is technically a first-generation blockchain, and like most first-generation blockchains, scalability has been a major issue. The initial Ethereum network could only process about 20 transactions per second.
At some point, the network has experienced clogging with delays that last for as long as days.
Consequently, the gas fees on the Ethereum main chain can be quite high due to constrained throughput.
It has been costly to run applications and process transactions on the Ethereum blockchain. Processing a transaction on the Ethereum main chain can cost as much as $20 worth of gas. Such high fees can discourage investors and users from trading your memecoin.
Nevertheless, Ethereum is still the most established blockchain for dApps and smart contracts. It has the most extensive collection of tools and a community of developers, not to mention the availability of liquidity and trading options.
Using Ethereum to launch a meme coin provides it with relatively high exposure, gives it credibility, and offers complex functionalities.
You can create a memecoin on Ethereum by writing a smart contract from scratch using Foundry or Hardhat environment. That, of course, requires you to have programming skills, especially writing smart contracts using the Solidity language.
You can also use a meme token generator, a tool built for that purpose with a user-friendly interface. The most popular token generators on the Ethereum main chain include:
Memecoins on Ethereum L2 platforms
Given that Ethereum offers a great ecosystem for minting assets except for the fact that it is slower and costly, layer 2 (L2) solutions that benefit from its advantages but provide higher speeds and lower transaction fees have been built. Most of these platforms use the Rollup protocol to make transactions on the Ethereum network faster and cheaper.
The following are L2 platforms on the Ethereum network that support the minting and use of memecoins:
BNB Chain
This blockchain was launched by the Binance exchange on top of the Ethereum network in September 2020. It has grown to have the largest collection of memecoins. Floki, the seventh most valuable memecoin, is on this L2 chain. It can process about 100 transactions per second and charges fees ranging between $0.012 to $0.035 per transaction.
You can create a memecoin on BNB Chain using the following tools:
The BNB Chain offers an ecosystem and ready infrastructure to help your memecoin thrive. That includes wallets and the Binance exchange, including the elaborate PancakeSwap DEX, through which you can easily establish a market and liquidity.
It is also largely compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Whatever application or memecoin you build on the BNB Chain can easily be implemented on the Ethereum network.
The little concern about launching a memecoin on the BNB Chain is that its network is less decentralized than the Ethereum main chain, as many see it as an extension of the Binance exchange.
Arbitrum
Arbitrum can process up to tens of thousands of transactions per second. Users get instant processing and are charged less than a dollar per transaction.
The tools you can use to mint memecoins on Arbitrum include:
Base
This layer 2 platform on the Ethereum blockchain hosts one of the largest numbers of Memecoins. It is a project by the exchange brand Coinbase. It can process up to 30 transactions per second.
Nevertheless, like other L2 platforms on the Ethereum network, you can write, test, and launch smart contracts, including those for memecoins, on the Base network using the Foundry environment.
However, you can opt to use a Memecoin generator. The ones that work with Base include:
It also raises the same concern regarding decentralization as BNB Chain, as it is significantly controlled by Coinbase. However, it has been reported that it sometimes experiences delays. That also means that while users pay comparatively lower fees, they can expect to pay slightly higher fees in times of high traffic.
Polygon
Polygon was launched in 2017 as the Matic Network before rebranding to Polygon in 2022. It can process more than 32 transactions per second, and a transaction is charged a network fee of less than $0.01.
You can mint memecoins on the Polygon platform using any of the following tools:
The Solana Blockchain
Solana is a proof-of-stake blockchain with smart contract capabilities that was launched in 2020 by Solana Labs. Over time, Solana has become a popular blockchain for launching and trading memecoins.
Some of the most popular memecoins on Solana in the crypto space include Dogwifhat, Bonk, Popcat, Floki, and Brett.
The Solana platform provides many of the necessary tools and APIs for anyone to mint their own fungible or non-fungible digital assets and have them available for trading at exchanges.
Being a second-generation blockchain, Solana was designed to solve the scalability problem that early blockchains faced. Consequently, it can process more than 3000 transactions per second, allowing users to enjoy near-instant transactions at a fraction of the cost of other blockchain platforms.
The tools that can help you mint and manage memecoins on Solana include:
Besides using online token generators, you can also download similar tools from GitHub, install them on your desktop, and use them for the same purpose.
The Open Network (TON)
The Open Network (TON) is part of the Telegram project, which gives it advantages over other blockchains, particularly in marketing, community management, and access to an ecosystem of gaming applications.
The project was launched in late 2019. It utilizes sharding protocols, making it unnecessary for all transactions to be on the same queue for confirmation. This opens up the potential for the network to process hundreds of thousands of transactions per second.
A transaction is charged about 0.005 tons of gas, which is less than a dollar to be confirmed on the TON network.
The list of generators you can use to mint and manage memecoins on the TON network includes:
The TRON network
TRON is a network that was founded by Justin Sun in 2017. Over time, the network has developed some capacity to support memecoins. In particular, it supports smart contracts and can process as many as 2000 transactions per second.
The average fees per transaction range between $0.1 and $3, depending on the network congestion.
Unfortunately, the popular token generators, particularly Coin Factory, Smithii, and Bitbond, do not support TRON. However, you can use a minting tool known as Sun Pump.
The most feasible option is to write and launch a smart contract in the TRON Studio, an integrated development environment (IDE). That means you need programming skills to create a memecoin on the network using this option.
Other blockchains that support the creation of memecoins include Avalanche, Fantom, Blast, and Meld. Others are the layer 2 platform Optimism.
Last words
There was a time when technology alone could guarantee the success of a memecoin or any other asset minted on the blockchain. However, as it has become easier to mint assets, success has become more reliant on the robustness of the game theory of the memecoin and the marketing strategy put in place.
Nevertheless, it is still critical to pick and utilize the right technology for game theory and marketing strategy to have the best chance of granting you success. If you pick the wrong blockchain or network on which to launch your memecoin, the best game theory and marketing strategies might not produce the best results for you. However, the process might also turn out to be complicated, and the memecoin might not have the right market environment to flourish.
List of Blockchains And Tools for Minting Memecoins was originally published in The Capital on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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