Meme Coin News This Week: What Moved and What to Avoid (July 11)
Dogecoin lags, Shiba Inu gets rejected twice, Pepe leads the meme sector this week. Weekly meme coin roundup with UK tax notes and rug pull warnings.
Dogecoin is lagging the pack, Shiba Inu just got rejected at resistance twice, and Pepe is the only major meme coin actually holding its gains. UK crypto investors keep asking whether meme coins still matter in a market led by Ethereum and Solana this week. The honest answer: they’re smaller than the headlines suggest, but the moves are real and worth understanding properly before you act on any of them.
Dogecoin: Losing Steam After Rejection at Resistance
DOGE is trading below $0.0745, after facing rejection at the weekly resistance level of $0.0782 and losing 1.5% the previous day. It’s up just 4.17% for the week, badly lagging the broader market.
Market cap sits around $11.68 billion, with 24-hour trading volume of $812.2 million. That volume is healthy for a meme coin, but the price action shows buyers losing conviction near resistance.
For context, Ethereum rose 11.7% and Solana rose 10% over the same period, while Bitcoin gained 6.4%. Dogecoin’s underperformance against the majors is the real story this week, not any single price move.
Dogecoin remains the most liquid and widely traded meme coin by a large margin, which means its price action often sets the tone for how the entire meme sector is perceived, fairly or not.
Elon Musk-adjacent commentary still moves DOGE more than any fundamental development, a dynamic that has held steady for years and shows no sign of weakening despite repeated predictions that it would.
Shiba Inu: Rejected at the Same Level Twice
SHIB recovered more than 6% the previous week and retested a descending trendline near $0.0000045, roughly matching a daily resistance level. It failed to close above that level on Sunday.
Since then, SHIB has declined more than 3% over two days, trading below $0.0000043. Two consecutive rejections at the same technical level is a pattern worth watching closely.
Technical analysts consider repeated rejection at one price level a sign that sellers are consistently outnumbering buyers there, which often means the coin needs a longer consolidation period before it can break through.
The Shiba Inu ecosystem has continued expanding its Shibarium layer-2 network in the background, though development progress hasn’t yet translated into sustained price strength this month.
Burn rate tracking, a metric the Shiba Inu community watches closely, showed another quiet week with no significant spike large enough to meaningfully affect circulating supply.
Pepe: The Strongest Major Meme Coin This Week
PEPE rose more than 16% the previous week, making it the standout performer among large meme coins. It’s now pulling back on profit-taking, which is normal after a move that size.
Weekly data puts PEPE up 15.67%, with volume backing the move rather than a thin, easily reversed spike. That distinction matters when judging whether a rally is likely to hold.
Profit-taking after a 16% weekly gain is healthy market behaviour, not necessarily a sign of underlying weakness. The question now is whether PEPE can hold above its pre-rally support levels.
Pepe has increasingly attracted attention from traders looking for the highest-beta play within the meme sector, since it tends to move further and faster than Dogecoin or Shiba Inu in both directions.
Why Meme Coins Lagged the Majors This Week
Ethereum, Solana and Bitcoin all posted double-digit or near-double-digit weekly gains, while the meme sector as a whole rose far more modestly. This divergence often happens when institutional money leads a rally.
Institutional capital tends to flow into large-cap, liquid assets first. Meme coin rallies typically follow with a lag, once retail traders see the majors moving and start chasing returns elsewhere.
UK investors keep asking whether this lag signals meme coins are “dying.” History suggests otherwise — meme sector rotations have followed major rallies in every cycle since 2021, just with a delay of days to weeks.
Watching whether meme coin trading volume picks up over the coming week is a reasonable early signal for whether that historical rotation pattern is starting to repeat this time around.
New Meme Coin Launches Worth a Cautious Look
Several new meme tokens launched on Solana and Base this week, riding the general market strength. Most will fail within days, as is normal for this extremely high-risk corner of crypto.
Genuine differentiators are rare. A working use case, an active community built over weeks rather than hours, or genuine liquidity locked for a meaningful period are the few signals worth checking before touching anything new.
The overwhelming majority of new meme launches are designed to extract liquidity from early buyers within hours, not to build anything lasting. Treat every new listing as a total loss scenario until proven otherwise.
Even projects that survive their first week frequently fail within the first month, once initial hype fades and there’s no ongoing reason for holders to stay engaged.
Rug Pulls and Liquidity Traps This Week
Several smaller tokens riding the meme rally’s coattails saw liquidity pulled within hours of launch this week, a pattern commonly called a rug pull. Early buyers were left holding worthless tokens.
The telltale sign in most cases: an anonymous team, liquidity that wasn’t locked, and a Telegram group deleted the moment the liquidity vanished. All three together is close to a guarantee of a scam.
Tools like RugCheck and Token Sniffer can flag some of these risks before you buy, though none of them catch everything. Treat any green checkmark as a starting point, not a guarantee.
Locked liquidity itself isn’t a full guarantee of safety either — some scams simply wait out the lock period before executing a slower, less obvious exit that’s harder to spot in real time.
Social Sentiment: What’s Trending and What It Means
Meme coin social mentions across X and Reddit tracked closely with Pepe’s rally this week, spiking sharply during the strongest days of the move and cooling as the pullback began.
Sentiment tracking tools are a useful lagging indicator but a poor leading one. By the time a coin trends heavily on social media, much of the easy gain has usually already happened.
UK investors keep asking how to use this data practically. The most reliable approach is treating heavy social buzz as a caution flag for new entries, not a buy signal to chase.
UK Tax Treatment of Meme Coin Gains
HMRC treats meme coin trading the same as any other cryptocurrency for Capital Gains Tax purposes. Gains above your £3,000 annual exemption are taxable, regardless of how volatile or “joke” the asset is.
High-frequency meme coin trading can generate dozens or hundreds of taxable events in a single month. Keeping accurate records at the time of each trade is far easier than reconstructing them later.
Losses on meme coins that go to zero can be claimed against gains elsewhere, provided you report the loss to HMRC. Many UK traders miss this relief simply because they never file the claim.
HMRC’s own guidance on “negligible value” claims covers tokens that still technically exist but are functionally worthless, which applies to a large share of failed meme coin launches from past cycles.
Position Sizing: The Rule Most Traders Ignore
Professional traders who touch meme coins at all typically cap exposure at a small single-digit percentage of their total portfolio, treating the entire allocation as money they can afford to lose completely.
Retail investors frequently do the opposite, putting outsized bets on meme coins specifically because the potential upside feels exciting. That asymmetry between professional and retail behaviour explains a lot of retail losses.
A simple test before buying any meme coin: would you be genuinely fine never seeing this money again? If not, the position is too large regardless of how confident you feel about it.
Liquidity and Slippage: The Hidden Cost Traders Miss
Many smaller meme coins have thin order books, meaning a moderately sized trade can move the price significantly against you before it fully executes, especially on decentralised exchanges.
Checking a token’s liquidity depth before trading, not just its headline market cap, prevents a nasty surprise where your actual entry price is far worse than the last traded price shown.
This effect compounds on the way out too — exiting a large position in a thin market can crash the price you receive well below what the chart appeared to promise moments earlier, sometimes dramatically so.
Checking the “sell tax” built into some meme coin contracts is worth doing too — a handful of tokens impose a steep fee on every sale that only becomes visible once you try to exit.
What This Means for UK Readers
This week’s meme coin story is really about the majors pulling ahead, with Pepe the lone standout among large meme coins and Dogecoin quietly falling behind. Nothing here suggests panic, just a normal rotation.
The rug pull activity riding this rally is the bigger practical risk for most UK readers, far more than which established coin gains or loses a few percent this week.
Read our no-hype guide to meme coins for the fundamentals before putting real money into any of this.
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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