What are meme coins? Meme coins are cryptocurrencies that have gained popularity in a short amount of time, usually as a result of influencers and retail investors promoting them online. Dogecoin is the original meme coin: It was created as a joke based on a meme back in 2013. It rose to fame after Elon Musk began tweeting about the cryptocurrency, and retail investors started buying in droves. Because anybody can create a new cryptocurrency, developers have released a slew of meme coins after Dogecoin. Many of these coins are spinoffs of Dogecoin -- take the coin Shiba Inu (CRYPTO:SHIB), for example -- but there are thousands of other meme coins out there. In fact, according to the website CoinMarketCap, there are more than 5,000 meme coins in existence as of this writing. What's the difference between cryptocurrency and meme coins? Meme coins are a type of cryptocurrency, but there's one major difference between cryptocurrencies like Dogecoin and Shiba Inu and currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum, and it comes down to utility. Major cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum were developed to solve real-world problems. The goal is to eventually become widely accepted by merchants, creating a new form of decentralized currency and revolutionizing a variety of industries. Meme coins, on the other hand, serve no real-world purpose right now, and most of them were created as a way to make a quick buck. However, some meme coins eventually gain widespread adoption and eventually gain a use case.