This round of Ethereum meme started with a reply from a small dog and Musk.

A few days ago, SpaceX founder Elon Musk replied to a post by media personality Glenn Beck on X. The post mentioned that a teenage girl, before succumbing to cancer, hand-designed a Shiba Inu plushie named Asteroid and sent it on SpaceX's 2024 Polaris Dawn mission. The plushie served as a zero-gravity indicator inside the spacecraft, being the first thing 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 four words: Will answer shortly.

On-chain traders, with their keen sense of smell, immediately took action. They discovered a memecoin on Ethereum called $ASTEROID, existing for 19 months with almost no attention. However, on that day, it skyrocketed over 1,000% in six hours. Someone put in 1 ETH and withdrew $470,000 three hours later. This sudden wealth case quickly spread on social media, triggering a new wave of FOMO.

Subsequently, the gas fee on the Ethereum mainnet surged from 0.052 Gwei and then stabilized around 0.6 Gwei for the next few days, marking an increase of over tenfold. The number of Uniswap V2 trading pairs started to rise, and the 24-hour trading volume of the meme sector temporarily surpassed mainstream DeFi protocols.

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

Mascot Concept

The fact that $ASTEROID the dog can pump is not just because Musk mentioned it, but also because it has a "real physical existence": it has actually been to space, there are photos, mission records, and verifiability. This sets it apart from ordinary fabricated memes, as it has a real-world anchor.

This logic subsequently gave rise to a new wave of tokens with the theme of "real-world existing mascot characters":

For example, $RISE is using the NASA logo, describing itself as the "NASA Official Mascot." Of course, NASA has not authorized any Token, and this is a typical case of leveraging an official image. However, the narrative is clear: a space agency + U.S. symbol + riding the wave after $ASTEROID. Within a few days of launching, the market value has exceeded $900,000, making it the most liquid project in this space-themed wave.

On the other hand, $FLOAT directly reused the core prop of $ASTEROID: the zero-gravity indicator. The project is named "SpaceX Zero-G Squad," with the website floatsquad.xyz. The concept takes the ritual represented by ASTEROID (throwing a plush toy into the spacecraft before each launch to confirm weightlessness) and turns it into a collective narrative. It saw a price increase of over 2000% within 24 hours, but its volume is minimal, and it is currently experiencing a pullback.

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

There is also an outlier in the space narrative. $CLUTCH does not follow the space theme but instead piggybacks on another upcoming real-world event: the FIFA World Cup set to open on June 11, 2026. Clutch is the official mascot announced by FIFA for the U.S. team, a white-headed eagle wearing the number 10 jersey.

The $CLUTCH project team directly copied the FIFA mascot's webpage URL on their official website, displaying an undisguised stance. Clearly, this meme is betting on the "calendar catalyst," where as the event approaches, external factors will continue to drive traffic. It experienced a price surge of over 43,000% at one point within 24 hours, but its market cap is still below $700,000, indicating it is in a very early stage.

Apart from the mascot concept, the dog represented by $ASTEROID once again ignited the Musk and Tesla concepts, as seen in $RIZO, for instance.

Rizo's narrative revolves around a hedgehog, initially created as the corporate mascot for the Spanish insurance company Génesis Seguros in 2008. The hedgehog making the "OK" hand gesture with a friendly expression was originally just business material. However, around 2013, internet users turned it into the "haha yes" meme, widely circulated as a reaction image with affirmative captions, symbolizing "this is correct" or "I agree."

Musk brought it into Tesla's product experience in 2019: the confirmation page for purchasing a Model Y featured this hedgehog with the caption "S3XY." Over the following years, Rizo appeared on the limited edition Cyber Beer bottle from Tesla, an Easter egg on the flagpole at Gigafactory Texas (visible only from a drone's aerial view), a cyberpunk version of the Cybertruck purchase confirmation page, and on Tesla's official T-shirt.

This is a meme symbol that Musk himself has consistently and repeatedly confirmed, not a one-sided interpretation by fans. The $RIZO memecoin's logic is built on this relationship. Currently, it has a market value of close to $200,000 and has surged over 28% in the past hour.

Comic Universe IP Rich in Memes

Pepe Frog's Brother MYSTERY

Pepe Frog's creator Matt Furie

Pepe Frog's creator, Matt Furie, published his first book, "The Night Riders," in 1999. It was 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 found a note at the end of the book revealing it as Mystery.

The protagonist animal characters from "The Night Riders"

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

The community around $MYSTERY provides only one sentence as the narrative framework: "You missed PEPE, this is the second chance."

This sentence can resonate in the crypto community not because it makes logical sense, but because everyone who experienced the PEPE pump remembers the feeling of "being afraid to buy" at that time. This fear has been accurately invoked. The marketing team of $MYSTERY has collaborated with the team behind Brett (currently valued at around $20 billion), providing a certain endorsement. With a current market capitalization close to $1.9 million, it is one of the projects with the highest liquidity among this new batch, with a 24-hour trading volume exceeding one million dollars.

FLORK and Its Derivative Universe

Among all these new projects, $FLORK is also an IP that is unrelated to crypto but has experienced the highest surge in meme value in a short period of time. The 6-hour increase is close to 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 crude, with MS Paint-style abstract stick figures that look like unfinished sock puppets. The expressions and dialogues follow an existentialist daily life mockery route. The "low-cost but highly relatable" quality is similar to early Rage Comics and Trollface, but Flork has lasted longer because its content is universal, and people from any cultural background can recognize themselves in those absurd stick figures. It is particularly popular in Latin America, becoming one of the daily emotional languages of the Spanish-speaking internet.

The Ethereum version of $FLORK's contract was created as early as April 2023, lying dormant for three years until this wave came. With a market capitalization close to $10 million, it is one of the main targets in this new batch of projects.

Its surge immediately led to the expansion of the "Flork Universe." $FLORKY is the female version of Flork that just launched today. The occasional female characters in the Flork of Cows comic, with a 6-hour increase of 1331% and even opening an Instagram account. $BABYFLORK is the baby version, with a 24-hour surge of 1722%. This path of "main project → derived baby/girl" has been followed by most major IPs and represents a highly mature expansion logic in the meme sector.

Political Memes, MAGA Variant

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

$MAGA, short for Make Aliens Great Again, twists Trump's campaign slogan by changing one word, linking it recently to the UFO/alien narrative. This is not a random combination: in 2025, the U.S. government did start systematically disclosing UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) files, which aligns closely with conspiracy theories, Tucker Carlson's audience, and the MAGA political symbol in the English crypto community.

The meme coin's official website directly linked to aliens.gov, the official UAP information disclosure page of the U.S. government. This type of "directly referencing real official assets" operation, similar to $CLUTCH linking to the FIFA website and $RISE using NASA imagery, is the same narrative technique.

There is also $BRITAIN, following the UK version of the MAGA route, with the background being a political aftershock left by Nigel Farage-led Reform UK Party's unexpected rise in the 2024 election. "Restore Britain" is a real political slogan. The meme's TikTok account has extended its reach to right-wing political audiences outside the crypto community. With a 220% increase in 24 hours, it is relatively moderate but shows high stability compared to other very new coins in this batch. It has been listed for several days, maintaining a balanced level of trading, showing signs of ongoing operation.

However, the risk of political memes lies in their fixed audience circle, with weaker ability to break through to new audiences compared to purely cultural memes. Nevertheless, these memes often have stronger community cohesion, making them less likely to disintegrate rapidly due to market fluctuations.

One Observation

This is very different from Solana's gaming.

Communities pointed out this fact on April 18: memes on Solana are PvP-oriented, characterized by quick trading in and out among traders, with the on-chain lifecycle measured in hours. Memes on Ethereum are slightly different, slower but tend to accumulate more narrative density. PEPE has built a community on Ethereum that has lasted for several years, while SHIB has branched out to its own Layer 2 on Ethereum.

This activation of Ethereum memes coincides with a particular window from a technical perspective: post-EIP-4844, gas is no longer a barrier, but the diffusion of L2 from the mainnet culture also means that traffic on the mainnet is particularly scarce. Once something genuinely hot appears, the concentration of funds will be stronger than ever before.

Most of these memes will eventually disappear, but the narratives and thought perspectives behind them are still very commemorative.

Disclaimer: The mentioned Tokens above are purely community-driven speculative assets, unaudited, lacking a roadmap. They are only used for case analysis purposes and do not constitute any investment advice.

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