Meme Coin News This Week: What Moved and What to Avoid (17 July)
DOGE lags, PEPE leads the legacy names, SPX6900 jumps 32% and BONK rides the Solana wave — this week’s meme coin roundup for UK investors.
The meme coin market had one of those weeks where the leaderboard flips completely. Dogecoin, the coin most casual investors still think of as “the meme coin,” barely moved. Meanwhile a joke token built around mocking the S&P 500 posted a 32% weekly gain. If you only check prices once a week, here’s what actually happened, and what’s just noise.
Dogecoin: Still Big, Still Lagging the Pack
DOGE traded around $0.07537 this week, with a market cap of $11.68 billion and 24-hour volume of $812.2 million. The weekly move was a modest 4.17% gain — respectable on its own, but weak compared to almost everything else in the sector. DOGE retreated after failing to clear a key resistance level, and social interest, one of the metrics that historically predicts DOGE momentum, has been softening for weeks.
Context matters here. The broader crypto market had a strong week — Ethereum up 11.7%, Solana up 10%, Bitcoin up 6.4% — and DOGE still couldn’t keep pace with its own sector, let alone the majors. That’s the story right now: the largest meme coin by market cap is coasting on brand recognition while smaller, more volatile tokens do the actual moving.
I’ve watched this pattern repeat across three separate rallies now. DOGE gets the headlines because it’s the name non-crypto people recognise, but the actual money-making moves increasingly happen in tokens most people outside crypto Twitter have never heard of. Dogecoin’s $11.68 billion market cap makes it too large to double on speculative flows alone — you’d need genuinely new capital, not just rotation, to shift a number that size. Smaller tokens don’t have that problem, which is exactly why they swing harder in both directions.
PEPE Leads the Old Guard
PEPE was the standout among the “legacy” meme coins, up 15.67% for the week with $207.28 million in 24-hour volume. That’s a meaningful move for a token this size, though PEPE has since pulled back slightly as traders locked in profits after the run. Shiba Inu, by contrast, stayed capped below a descending trendline and continues to look like the weakest of the three original meme heavyweights.
The pattern across DOGE, SHIB and PEPE this week was uneven momentum — one leg up, two legs dragging. That’s worth remembering next time a headline lumps “meme coins” together as if they move as a single block. They don’t.
PEPE’s 15.67% move is also a useful reminder of how quickly sentiment flips in this corner of the market. A double-digit weekly gain sounds impressive until you notice the pullback that followed almost immediately after — traders who bought the initial breakout and held through the profit-taking gave back a meaningful chunk of the paper gains within days. Meme coin momentum tends to be front-loaded: the first 48 hours of a move often account for most of the total gain, with the rest of the week spent digesting it.
SPX6900 Posts the Sector’s Biggest Move
SPX6900, the meme token that positions itself as a tongue-in-cheek rival to the S&P 500 index, jumped roughly 32% over the week — the strongest move of any major meme coin tracked. The project trades across Ethereum, Solana and Base, and has been burning close to 7% of its own circulating supply, a deflationary mechanic that’s clearly landing with traders right now.
SPX6900 is a good example of why “meme coin” has become a much broader category than it used to be. There’s no dog, no frog, no cultural reference beyond a wink at stock market indexing. It’s a meme about finance itself, and it’s currently outperforming coins with actual animal mascots.
The supply burn is worth dwelling on for a second, because it’s a genuinely different mechanic from most meme tokens, which rely purely on hype and liquidity to move price. Burning supply permanently removes tokens from circulation, so if demand holds steady or grows while supply shrinks, price has a structural tailwind that pure meme coins without any burn mechanism simply don’t have. It doesn’t make SPX6900 a “safe” investment — nothing in this category is — but it explains why the move this week wasn’t purely sentiment-driven.
BONK and PENGU Ride the Solana Wave
BONK, the flagship meme token of the Solana ecosystem, led weekly gains among the larger-cap memes at over 50%. That tracks with a pattern we’ve seen repeatedly: when SOL rallies, capital spills into Solana-native meme tokens with a short lag, and BONK is usually first in line.
Pudgy Penguins’ PENGU token also had a strong week, part of a broader meme sector rally that market trackers described as the strongest since the peak mania period in April 2025. PENGU’s appeal is a bit different from most memes — it’s backed by an actual NFT brand with real merchandising and licensing deals, which gives it a narrative beyond pure speculation. Total meme coin market capitalisation sits around $34.7 billion as of this week, with newer tokens increasingly pulling attention away from the DOGE-SHIB-PEPE trio that used to dominate every conversation.
What makes PENGU interesting from a UK reader’s perspective is that it blurs the line between meme coin and brand licensing play. Pudgy Penguins sells physical plush toys through mainstream retail channels, which gives the token a revenue-adjacent story that pure jokes like DOGE never had. Whether that makes it a “better” investment is genuinely debatable — a licensing deal doesn’t stop a token trading 40% in either direction in a week — but it does mean PENGU’s price action responds to different triggers than a coin with zero underlying business.
Meme Coin Volatility: A Reality Check
It’s easy to read a “BONK up 50%” headline and feel like you missed something huge. Zoom out, though, and these tokens routinely give back a large chunk of any weekly gain within the following fortnight. That’s the nature of an asset class with no earnings, no cash flow and no fundamental valuation anchor — price is almost entirely a function of attention, and attention moves on fast. Treat every meme coin percentage figure in this piece as a snapshot of one specific week, not a trend you can extrapolate forward.
What’s Driving the Rotation
The short version: risk appetite is up across crypto generally, and meme coins are the highest-beta way to express that appetite. When Bitcoin and Ethereum rally on stronger macro sentiment, traders looking for bigger percentage moves rotate into meme tokens, and Solana-based memes in particular benefit from SOL’s own strength this week. That’s not a new dynamic. It’s just worth remembering that meme coin rallies are usually a symptom of broader market confidence, not an independent signal of anything.
Watch Bitcoin and Ethereum first, meme coins second. When the majors stall or turn red, meme coin rallies tend to run out of fuel within days, because the speculative capital funding them retreats to safer ground fastest. Meme coins amplify the mood of the broader market; they rarely set it. Treat them as a leveraged bet on sentiment, not a separate market with its own logic.
Scam Watch: Fake Tokens Riding Real Names
Meme coin season always drags scam tokens along with it. The most common trick right now is launching a new token with a name and ticker deliberately close to a trending coin — a fake “BONK2” or “PEPE 2.0” — hoping confused buyers pile in without checking the contract address. Once enough liquidity arrives, the deployer pulls it in a classic rug pull.
Honeypot contracts are the other recurring problem: tokens that let you buy freely but block every sell transaction, trapping your money permanently. Before buying any meme coin you haven’t researched, check the contract on a block explorer, look for liquidity lock details, and search the exact contract address rather than trusting a name you saw trending. Never buy a meme coin because an anonymous account promised it was “about to 100x” — that’s the oldest trick in the book, and it still works on people every single week.
A newer variant worth flagging: AI-generated deepfake videos of well-known crypto figures or celebrities “endorsing” a specific meme token. These clips circulate on social media looking convincingly real, sometimes lifted from genuine interview footage and spliced with fabricated audio. No legitimate project needs a fake celebrity endorsement to sell tokens. If a clip seems slightly off — audio that doesn’t quite match lip movement, an endorsement that contradicts everything that person has said publicly before — assume it’s fabricated and move on.
What This Means for UK Readers
If you’re holding DOGE expecting it to keep pace with the rest of the sector, this week is a reminder that brand recognition alone doesn’t guarantee performance — smaller, more volatile names are doing the heavy lifting right now. If you’re chasing the SPX6900 or BONK momentum, remember these are exactly the kind of assets where gains reverse just as fast as they arrive; sizing your position so a 50% drop wouldn’t derail your finances is basic risk management, not pessimism. And regardless of which meme coin you hold, any disposal — selling, swapping, or spending it — is a taxable event in the UK once you’re above the £3,000 annual Capital Gains Tax exemption for 2025/26 and 2026/27, taxed at 18% or 24% depending on your income band. Keep records of purchase price, sale price and dates for every trade, because meme coin portfolios tend to have far more transactions than a simple Bitcoin buy-and-hold, and HMRC doesn’t care that most of them were small.
For a proper introduction to how this whole category works, including why some meme coins survive and most don’t, read our What Are Meme Coins? A No-Hype Guide for UK Investors.
This article is for educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Cryptocurrency investments involve significant risk. Always do your own research.
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