Dogecoin and Pepe led a strong coin rally on Friday, with traders looking ahead to “meme season” as 2026 begins.
Dogecoin was up around 11% over 24 hours, while Pepe was up around 17% the day after a stronger intraday surge.
Crypto’s meme basket has also heated up more broadly. CoinGecko’s GMCI Meme Index category showed a market value of around $33.8 billion with a 24-hour trading volume of around $5.9 billion, a sign that the move is more than just tokenism.
Meanwhile, the “dog-themed” basket is flashing green everywhere. After dogecoin, Shiba Inu rose 8% and Solana’s Bonk added almost 11%, while Floki climbed almost 10%.
The move was not limited to the majors and small caps moved faster, with Mog Coin up around 14% on the day and around 37% over seven days, while Popcat gained almost 9% and is up over 17% for the week.
Traders on
Loading…
Why do memes appear?
Bitcoin is range bound, liquidity is still spotty after the holidays, and traders are looking for the highest beta to express their risks without waiting for a clean macroeconomic catalyst.
Memes tend to benefit from this environment because they evolve quickly, have deep derivative markets on major platforms, and attract dynamic feeds that don’t need a core narrative.
This does not automatically mean that the market has entered a sustained meme cycle.
Many of these bursts are self-reinforcing in the short term, but are fragile. When positioning becomes crowded, spot demand declines, or bitcoin slips, meme coins can unwind quickly, as the same leverage that accelerates the rise can force sharp declines in risk moves.
One way to understand it is that memes act as a temperature control for speculative appetite.
A “meme season index” approach tracks the number of large meme tokens that outperform bitcoin over a defined window. If this figure continues to rise, it generally means that traders are moving into higher risk segments of the market rather than just buying large caps.
For now, price action indicates that traders are willing to take selective risks. The next signal will be whether the movement will expand beyond a handful of liquid meme names, or whether it will fade as quickly as it began.
