Meme Coin News This Week: What Moved and What to Avoid (August 4)
DOGE, SHIB and PEPE this week: what actually moved, which meme coins are trending, and the scam patterns UK traders should watch for.
Meme coins had another choppy week. Dogecoin, Shiba Inu and Pepe all moved, but not in the same direction at the same time, and the bigger story is what’s pulling attention away from the old guard entirely.
Here’s what actually moved, what’s drawing fresh money, and where the scam warnings landed this week.
UK investors keep asking us the same question every week: is this the week meme coins finally break the fade-fast pattern? Based on what the data actually shows this week, no — but that hasn’t stopped fresh capital rotating into whichever name is loudest on social media.
The Big Three: DOGE, SHIB and PEPE This Week
Shiba Inu was the standout mover this week, up around 3% on the day and roughly 13% over the past seven days, according to tracking data reviewed this week. Dogecoin and Pepe both saw more mixed price action, with traders watching key support levels rather than pushing for new highs.
The pattern across all three has been consistent for months now: rallies fade quickly, and buying pressure hasn’t sustained beyond a few days at a time. When I looked into the broader sector this week, that fade-fast pattern showed up in trading volume too — spikes on good news, then a slow bleed back toward the starting point within 72 hours.
Fartcoin and Pudgy Penguins Lead the Volume Charts
Away from the big three, Fartcoin (FARTCOIN) and Pudgy Penguins (PENGU) are now among the most actively traded meme tokens by volume. Neither is new, but both have held attention longer than most 2026-era launches, which typically burn out within weeks.
Fartcoin in particular has become something of a case study in narrative durability — a coin with no stated utility that has nonetheless maintained trading volume through multiple market cycles this year. Pudgy Penguins benefits from an actual product ecosystem, including physical toy licensing, which gives it a revenue angle most meme coins simply don’t have.
Ugly workaround or not, that’s the honest explanation for why these two keep showing up on trending lists while dozens of same-week launches vanish completely. Attention is the only asset a pure meme coin has, and both of these projects have found different ways to keep it — one through sheer absurdist branding, the other through a physical product line that gives holders a reason to stay engaged beyond the chart.
Bitcoin Hyper: The Presale Getting the Most Buzz
The most talked-about new project this week isn’t trading yet at all. Bitcoin Hyper, a Layer 2 built to make Bitcoin transactions faster and cheaper while adding smart contract capability, is the top trending meme-adjacent project on social platforms right now.
UK investors keep asking about this because it blends two narratives that rarely combine: Bitcoin’s brand recognition and the smart-contract flexibility usually associated with Ethereum-style chains. That combination is exactly why presale hype builds fast — and exactly why it deserves more scrutiny than a straightforward meme coin, since Layer 2 infrastructure claims are technical promises that take months to verify once mainnet actually launches.
Why Traders Are Getting More Selective
The wider meme coin market has shifted noticeably in 2026. After months of bot-driven launches and short-lived hype phases, attention is moving toward projects with early signals, a genuine narrative, and demonstrable community traction rather than pure speculation on a fresh contract address.
That’s a meaningful change from 2024 and 2025, when a coordinated Telegram push could send an unknown token up several hundred percent in hours. Liquidity has thinned across the bottom end of the meme coin market, and traders who got burned by rug pulls in prior cycles are demanding more before they’ll deploy capital — a bonding curve with locked liquidity, a doxxed team, or at minimum a track record longer than a few days.
I’ve seen this pattern with three different Telegram groups over the past year: the same wallets that used to ape into anything with a dog logo now wait for at least a day of stable trading before touching a new launch. That’s not caution born of wisdom so much as caution born of losses. A shorter memory would probably serve the sector’s newer entrants better, but the losses have been loud enough that the lesson stuck.
The Sector-Wide Numbers Behind the Noise
Meme coins as a category continue to represent a meaningful slice of daily crypto trading volume, even during weeks when individual tokens post flat or negative returns. That’s the paradox of this market: aggregate turnover stays high because capital rotates between tokens constantly, even as most individual holders are underwater relative to their entry point.
The first time I tried tracking a basket of that week’s “trending” meme coins across a full month, fewer than one in five were still trading above their starting price by the end of it. That’s not a reason to avoid the sector entirely, but it is a reason to treat any single meme coin as closer to a lottery ticket than an investment, sized accordingly in a portfolio.
None of this is unique to this particular week — it’s the standing baseline for the category. What changes week to week is which handful of tokens happen to be the ones riding the top of that churn. The mechanics underneath don’t change: new contract, initial pump on social buzz, thinning volume, and a long tail of holders who bought near the peak and are still waiting for a recovery that, for most tokens, never comes.
Scam Watch: The Airdrop-to-Drainer Pipeline
Meme coin hype and airdrop scams increasingly overlap, and this week was no exception. The FBI’s ongoing warning about fake token airdrops on the Tron network — tokens sent unprompted to wallets, followed by a malicious “claim” site — applies just as much to meme coins as to any other token category. Scammers specifically favour meme-coin branding because the target audience is already primed to expect random tokens showing up and offering outsized returns for minimal effort.
Wallet drainer scams of this type stole an estimated $500 million in 2024, and the tactics haven’t slowed down in 2026. The giveaway is almost always the same: a token you didn’t request, paired with urgency to connect your wallet or sign a transaction immediately.
Fake token names lean hard into whatever’s trending that week — expect knock-off tickers riffing on Fartcoin, Bitcoin Hyper or Pudgy Penguins the moment those names get enough search volume. A scam token mimicking a hot name will often use a near-identical logo and a contract address that looks plausible at a glance. Always verify a contract address against the project’s official social channels before interacting with any token, trending or otherwise.
How to Vet a Trending Meme Coin Before You Buy
A few checks take less than five minutes and catch most obvious rug pulls. Check whether liquidity is locked and for how long — an unlocked liquidity pool means the creator can pull every penny out instantly. Check the holder distribution; if one or two wallets hold more than 20-30% of supply, that’s concentration risk that can crash the price the moment they sell.
Check whether the contract has been renounced or still allows the creator to mint new supply at will. And check whether the team is public or anonymous — anonymity alone isn’t disqualifying in crypto, but combined with locked liquidity concerns and concentrated holdings, it’s a red flag stack that should give any buyer pause.
Free tools like block explorers and dedicated token-checker sites surface most of this in under a minute — you don’t need to trust a project’s own marketing copy to get these answers. If a token’s team actively discourages you from checking any of these four things yourself, treat that resistance as the loudest red flag on the list.
What This Means for UK Readers
HMRC treats meme coin trading the same as any other cryptoasset disposal for Capital Gains Tax purposes. Every swap, sale or trade of one token for another is a taxable event, and gains above the £3,000 annual exemption are taxed at your applicable rate. Given how frequently traders rotate between trending meme coins, the record-keeping burden here is genuinely higher than for a simple buy-and-hold Bitcoin position — every single swap needs a GBP value at the time of the transaction.
The FCA’s position on meme coins hasn’t softened. It continues to classify most of them as high-risk speculative assets with no consumer protection if something goes wrong, and its restrictions on crypto asset promotions mean UK platforms must present clear risk warnings before you can trade many of these tokens at all. If a platform lets you buy a brand-new meme coin with no friction and no warning, that’s worth noticing as a red flag about the platform itself, not just the token.
Also worth noting: several UK platforms have started adding cooling-off periods before first-time trades on newly-listed meme tokens, a direct response to complaints about impulse buying during hype spikes. It’s a small friction, but it’s the kind of small friction that tends to save people money.
For a deeper look at how this category works without the hype, read our no-hype guide to meme coins 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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