Ethereum Meme Season Makes a Comeback

This round of Ethereum memes started with a little dog and a reply from Elon Musk.

A few days ago, SpaceX founder Elon Musk replied on X to a post by media personality Glenn Beck. The post told the story of a teenage girl who, before passing away from cancer, hand-designed a Shiba Inu plush toy named Asteroid. She sent it on SpaceX's 2024 Polaris Dawn mission, where it served as a zero-gravity indicator on the spacecraft — the first object to float when humans entered weightlessness. One of the girl's final wishes was for Asteroid to become the official mascot of SpaceX.

Musk's reply was only three words: Will answer shortly.

On-chain traders, with their keen sense of opportunity, immediately sprang into action. They found a memecoin called $ASTEROID on Ethereum that had existed for 19 months, virtually unnoticed. But on that day, it surged over 1,000% within six hours. Someone entered with 1 ETH and withdrew $470,000 three hours later. This story of sudden wealth quickly spread across social media, triggering a new wave of FOMO.

Ethereum mainnet gas fees subsequently climbed from 0.052 Gwei, stabilizing around 0.6 Gwei over the following days — a more than tenfold increase. The number of trading pairs on Uniswap V2 began to surge, and the 24-hour trading volume of the meme sector briefly surpassed that of major DeFi protocols.

Gas fees are a good barometer. They are telling us: Ethereum's meme season is back. Today, let's look at the characteristics of this batch of Ethereum memes and their respective narrative logics.

Mascot Concept

$ASTEROID, this dog, caught fire not only because Musk acknowledged it, but also because it has a "real physical existence": it actually flew into space, with photos and mission records that can be verified. This is different from ordinary fabricated memes; it has an anchor point in the real world.

This logic subsequently spawned a batch of new projects themed around "real-world mascot characters":

For example, $RISE flies the NASA flag, describing itself as the "Official NASA Mascot." Of course, NASA has not authorized any token; this is a standard "piggybacking on an official image" operation. But the narrative is clear enough: space agency + American symbol + riding the coattails of $ASTEROID. Days after launch, its market cap exceeded $900,000, making it the project with the deepest liquidity among this wave of space-themed concepts.

Then there is $FLOAT, which directly reused the core prop of $ASTEROID: the zero-gravity indicator. The project is called "SpaceX Zero-G Squad," and its website is floatsquad.xyz. The logic is to turn the ritual represented by ASTEROID (throwing a plush toy into the spacecraft before each launch to confirm weightlessness) into a collective narrative. It saw a 24-hour gain of over 2,000%, but its size is very small and is currently in a correction.

Before each spacecraft launch, a plush toy is thrown in to confirm weightlessness.

There is also an outlier in the space narrative. $CLUTCH doesn't follow the space line but piggybacks on another imminent real-world event: the FIFA World Cup, set to open on June 11, 2026. Clutch is the official mascot for the US team released by FIFA, a bald eagle wearing the number 10 jersey.

The $CLUTCH project team directly filled the website field on their official page with the URL of FIFA's mascot page — an unabashed gesture. Obviously, this meme is betting on a "calendar catalyst." As the event approaches, external events will continuously funnel in traffic. Its 24-hour gain once exceeded 43,000%, but its market cap is still under $700,000, placing it in the very early stages.

Beyond the mascot concept, the $ASTEROID dog has also re-ignited the Musk and Tesla narrative, for example with $RIZO.

Rizo's narrative is a hedgehog, originally created as a corporate mascot by the Spanish insurance company Génesis Seguros in 2008. The hedgehog, making an "OK" gesture with a friendly expression, was initially just commercial素材. Around 2013, netizens turned it into the widespread "haha yes" meme series — pairing it with various affirmative captions, it became a universal reaction image for expressing "that's right" or "I'm satisfied."

Musk incorporated it into the Tesla product experience in 2019: the hedgehog appeared on the confirmation page for purchasing a Model Y, with the caption "S3XY." In subsequent years, Rizo appeared on the bottle etching of limited Tesla Cyber Beer, an Easter egg on the flagpole at the Texas Gigafactory (visible only with a drone shot), the cyberpunk version of the Cybertruck purchase confirmation page, and official Tesla T-shirts.

This is a meme symbol that has been continuously and repeatedly confirmed by Musk himself, not a unilateral interpretation by fans. The logic of the $RIZO memecoin is built on this relationship. Its current market cap is close to $200,000, with a rebound of over 28% in the last hour.

Comic IPs are Prolific Meme Sources

Pepe the Frog's Brother: MYSTERY

Matt Furie, the creator of Pepe the Frog

Matt Furie, the creator of Pepe the Frog, published his first book, "The Night Riders," in 1999. It's a wordless picture book featuring four animal characters: a frog, a mouse, a dragon, and a bat. For years, no one knew the frog's name until someone unearthed a note at the end of the book, revealing it was called Mystery.

The main animal characters from "The Night Riders"

In Furie's own NFT series, HEDZ, there is also a character named Mystery, depicted as his avatar wearing an orange hood — in a sense, the author's declaration of identification with this character.

The narrative framework provided by the $MYSTERY community is just one sentence: "You missed PEPE; this is your second chance."

This sentence resonates in the crypto world, not because it's logically sound, but because everyone who experienced the PEPE rally remembers the feeling of "being afraid to buy." That fear is precisely summoned. $MYSTERY's marketing team has partnered with the team behind Brett (currently with a market cap of about $2 billion), providing a certain level of endorsement. Its current market cap is close to $1.9 million, making it one of the projects with the thickest liquidity among this new batch, with a 24-hour trading volume exceeding one million dollars.

FLORK and Its Extended Universe

Among all these new projects, $FLORK is a meme whose IP itself has nothing to do with crypto, yet it managed to achieve the largest surge in the shortest time. Its 6-hour gain was nearly 6,000%, with a 24-hour trading volume exceeding $8 million.

Flork of Cows is a webcomic that has been updated since 2012, created by Brian DiAntonio. The art style is extremely rudimentary, featuring MS Paint-style abstract stick figures that look like unfinished sock puppets, with expressions and dialogue leaning towards existential, everyday complaints. This "low-cost but highly addictive" vibe is similar to early Rage Comics or Trollface, but it has outlasted them because Flork's content is universal; people from any cultural background can recognize themselves in those absurd characters. It is particularly popular in Latin America, becoming one of the daily emotional languages of the Spanish-speaking internet.

The contract for the ETH version of $FLORK was created as early as April 2023, lay dormant for three years, and waited for this wave. Its market cap is close to $10 million, making it a major target among this batch of new projects.

Its explosion subsequently drove the expansion of the "Flork universe." $FLORKY, the female version of Flork, launched only today. Female characters occasionally appear in the Flork of Cows comics. It saw a 6-hour gain of 1,331% and has already opened an Instagram account. $BABYFLORK is the baby version, with a 24-hour gain of 1,722%. This path of "main project → derivative baby/girl" is one that major IPs have generally followed, representing a mature expansion logic within the meme sector.

Political Memes: MAGA Variants

If mascot concepts and space narratives are emotion-driven, political memes follow a different logic: a sense of opposition and identity.

$MAGA, which stands for Make Aliens Great Again, twists Trump's campaign slogan by one word, grafting it onto the recent UFO/alien narrative. This isn't random combination: in 2025, the US government did begin systematically releasing UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) archives, an event that highly overlaps in the English crypto sphere with conspiracy theories, Tucker Carlson's audience, and MAGA political symbols.

The meme coin's official website directly links to aliens.gov, the US government's official UAP information disclosure page. This "directly referencing real official assets" operation is the same narrative technique used by $CLUTCH linking to the FIFA website and $RISE using NASA imagery.

Then there is $BRITAIN. This meme follows the British version of the MAGA route, set against the political aftershocks of the Reform UK party, led by Nigel Farage, unexpectedly rising in the 2024 general election. "Restore Britain" is a real political slogan. The meme's TikTok account reaches right-wing political audiences outside the crypto sphere. Its 24-hour gain is 220%, relatively moderate, but its stability is higher than other extremely new projects in this batch. It has been listed for several days, with balanced buying and selling and signs of ongoing operation.

However, the risk of political memes is that their audience is niche, with weaker potential to break out of their circle compared to purely cultural memes. But their community cohesion is often stronger, making them less likely to disintegrate quickly when market sentiment cools.

An Observation

This is very different from the game on Solana.

Communities pointed this out in a post on April 18: Memes on Solana are PvP — fast in and fast out, primarily a game of trading against each other, with on-chain lifecycles measured in hours. Memes on Ethereum are somewhat different; they are slower but tend to accumulate greater narrative density. PEPE built a community on Ethereum that lasted for years, and SHIB launched its own Layer 2 on Ethereum.

Technically, the activation of this round of Ethereum memes coincided with a unique window: after EIP-4844, gas is no longer a barrier, but the diversion of mainnet culture to L2s also means that traffic on the mainnet is exceptionally scarce. Once something with genuine buzz appears, the capital concentration effect will be stronger than ever before.

$ASTEROID was the initial ignition device. What followed is what we are seeing now: $MYSTERY multiplied tens of thousands of times overnight, $FLORK slept for three years before its moment arrived, and $CLUTCH waits for its calendar catalyst before the World Cup kicks off.

Most of these memes will still disappear, but these narratives and perspectives are still very meaningful to document.

Note: The tokens mentioned above are purely community-driven speculative assets. They are unaudited, have no roadmap, and are used only for case study analysis. They do not constitute any investment advice.