Meme coins, from zero

A blockchain is a public record of who owns what, copied on thousands of computers. Nobody can quietly edit it, and anyone can read it. That's why crypto works without a bank: the record itself is the bank statement.

Each blockchain has its own coin used to pay fees: Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Solana (SOL), BNB Chain (BNB), and Base, a cheaper network built on top of Ethereum that also uses ETH.

Most meme coins are tokens: they don't have their own blockchain, they live on one of these. Today most new meme coins launch on Solana (fast, fees under a cent), then Base and Ethereum.

A wallet is an app that holds the keys to your coins. There are two kinds:

• Exchange account (Coinbase, Kraken, Binance…): the company holds your coins, like a bank. Easy, and you can get your money back to your bank account. But you can only buy what they list, usually not brand-new meme coins.
• Self-custody wallet (Phantom for Solana, MetaMask or Rabby for Ethereum and Base): you hold the keys. You can buy any token on decentralized exchanges. Nobody can freeze it, and nobody can rescue you either.

When you create a self-custody wallet you get a seed phrase: 12 or 24 words. Whoever has those words owns everything in the wallet, from any device, forever.

Centralized exchanges (CEX) like Coinbase or Kraken are companies. You send euros or dollars, buy crypto, and they check your identity. They list a meme coin only once it's big, which already filters out most scams (not all).

Decentralized exchanges (DEX) are programs on a blockchain: Jupiter and Raydium on Solana, Uniswap on Ethereum and Base. You connect your wallet and swap one token for another. Anyone can list anything, which is why brand-new meme coins appear there first.

The usual path: buy SOL or ETH on a CEX, send it to your own wallet, swap on a DEX.

Every action on a blockchain costs a network fee ("gas"), paid in the chain's coin. Rough costs: Solana under $0.01 (more with "priority fees" when busy), Base a few cents, Ethereum from under a dollar to tens of dollars when busy.

Keep a little of the chain's coin in your wallet at all times, or you'll be stuck unable to sell.

Stablecoins (USDC, USDT) are tokens worth $1. They're where you park profits without leaving crypto. "Taking profit into USDC" is a phrase you'll hear a lot.

DEX swaps also have a trading fee (often 0.25 to 1%) and slippage, the difference between the price you see and the price you get. We cover slippage in course 4.

• 2013, Dogecoin: made as a joke by two engineers, using the Shiba Inu "doge" meme. It became the first meme coin worth billions, helped by Elon Musk's tweets in 2021.
• 2020–21, Shiba Inu (SHIB): an "Ethereum Dogecoin". Turned tiny amounts into fortunes for a few early buyers, which created the dream everyone still chases.
• 2023, PEPE: launched with no team or roadmap and reached a billion-dollar value within weeks.
• 2023–24, Solana memes (BONK, WIF, POPCAT): cheap fees made Solana the home of meme coins.
• 2024 onward, launchpads like Pump.fun: anyone can launch a coin in a minute. Tens of thousands launch every day.

The pattern: each cycle a few coins become huge, and thousands go to zero.

A meme coin has no profits, no product and usually no plan. Its price is only attention and the money that follows it. That means:

• Narrative: a funny character, a celebrity, a news event, a new chain. The story is the product.
• Community: people who hold and post about it. Strong communities survive dips; weak ones vanish.
• Listings: getting onto a big exchange (Binance, Coinbase, Robinhood) brings new buyers and often a spike.
• Market mood: when Bitcoin and Solana rise, money spills into memes. When they fall, memes fall 2 to 5 times harder.
• Big wallets: a few holders can move a small coin by themselves.

The success stories are real, but they're survivors. A 2025 analysis by blockchain-security firm Solidus Labs estimated that roughly 98% of tokens launched on Pump.fun behaved like rug pulls or pump-and-dumps. Even among meme coins that reach exchanges, most lose 80 to 99% from their peak.

Who usually wins: the creators, insiders who bought in the first seconds, bots, and people who sell early. Who usually loses: people who buy after seeing it trend on social media.

On launchpads like Pump.fun, a new coin starts on a bonding curve: a built-in market where each buy pushes the price up along a formula. When enough money comes in, the coin "graduates" to a normal DEX pool.

What this means for you:

• The first buyers (often bots and the creator's other wallets) get the lowest price by far.
• Most coins never graduate. The few that do are often dumped by early buyers right after.
• "Just graduated" or "about to graduate" lists are where a lot of beginner money gets lost.

Market cap = price × number of tokens. A coin at $0.00001 isn't "cheap"; if there are a quadrillion tokens it's worth billions.

Classic trap: "SHIB will reach $1". SHIB has about 589 trillion tokens, so $1 would mean a $589 trillion market cap, several times all the money in the world's stock markets. Always ask: what market cap would that price mean? The Tools page has a calculator for this.

FDV (fully diluted value) is the market cap if every token that will ever exist were already out. A big gap between market cap and FDV means more tokens are coming, which pushes price down.

On a DEX, you trade against a liquidity pool: a pot holding the token and SOL/ETH/USDC. The bigger the pool, the more you can buy or sell without moving the price.

• Liquidity under about 5% of market cap is thin: a few sellers can crash it.
• Who owns the pool? If the creator can withdraw it ("pull the rug"), the coin can become unsellable in one transaction. Look for liquidity that's burned (destroyed) or locked for a long time.
• Pump.fun coins that graduated have their pool tokens burned automatically, which removes this specific risk, but not the others.

Look at the top 10 holders (excluding the liquidity pool and exchange wallets). If they own more than about 20 to 30% together, a handful of people can dump on everyone else.

Watch out for bundles and snipers: the creator buys a big share at launch from dozens of fresh wallets so it looks spread out. Tools like Bubblemaps draw lines between wallets that funded each other. A cluster of connected wallets is one person.

Also check the dev wallet: did the creator sell? Many tools flag "dev sold" or "dev holds X%".

A token's contract can give its creator special powers. The ones that matter:

Tools that check these in seconds: RugCheck (Solana), Honeypot.is and Token Sniffer (Ethereum, Base, BNB). The Charts page links them for each coin.

1. Open an account on a regulated exchange available where you live (for example Coinbase or Kraken). Turn on two-factor authentication with an authenticator app, not SMS.
2. Install a wallet from the official app store or website only: Phantom for Solana, Rabby or MetaMask for Ethereum/Base. Search ads often show fake wallets.
3. Write the seed phrase on paper. Not a screenshot, not notes, not email.
4. Bookmark the real DEX sites (jup.ag, uniswap.org, dexscreener.com) and only use the bookmarks.
5. Optional but smart: use a separate "trading" wallet with small amounts, and keep savings in another wallet (or a hardware wallet like Ledger) that never connects to new sites.

1. Buy SOL (or ETH) on the exchange and withdraw it to your wallet address. Send a small test amount first, check it arrives, then the rest.
2. Find the token's contract address from a trusted source (CoinGecko, DexScreener, the project's verified X account). Never search by name or ticker alone: there are always fake copies with the same name.
3. Paste the address into Jupiter (Solana) or Uniswap. Check the logo, market cap and liquidity match what you saw.
4. Run the safety check from the Playbook.
5. Swap a small amount. Check the token appears in your wallet, and try selling a tiny bit to make sure you can.

Slippage tolerance is how much worse a price you accept. If the price moves more than that before your trade goes through, it fails instead of filling badly.

• Big coins: 0.5 to 1% is enough.
• Small, fast meme coins: often 3 to 10%. Above 15% you're inviting "sandwich" bots to buy right before you and sell right after, taking the difference.
• If a token only works with 30%+ slippage, it probably has a hidden tax or extreme volatility. Walk away.

Priority fees (Solana) pay validators to process your trade first when the network is busy. Jupiter's "auto" setting is fine for most people.

On Ethereum and Base, swapping a token often asks you to "approve" a contract to spend it. A malicious site can ask for unlimited approval and drain that token later.

• Read every wallet pop-up. If it says "set approval for all" or asks to spend tokens you didn't mean to trade, reject it.
• Use revoke.cash every month to remove old approvals. (Add it as a reminder on the Alerts page.)
• On Solana, watch for transactions that "transfer" or "close" accounts you didn't expect. Phantom shows a preview; read it.

• Long wick on top: buyers pushed up, sellers slammed it back down. Often a warning.
• Volume (bars under the chart) shows how much was traded. A rise on rising volume is stronger than a rise on falling volume.
• Huge red candle on huge volume after a pump: often insiders or whales selling.

Support is a price where buyers showed up before; resistance is where sellers did. They're zones, not exact lines, and they break all the time in meme coins.

Meme traders think in market cap milestones: $1M, $10M, $100M, $1B. Many people place sells at round numbers, so price often stalls just below them.

Use these levels to plan, not to predict: "if it falls below my last support, my reason for holding is gone."

Crypto moves in big moods. Meme coins do best late in a bull market, when Bitcoin has already risen and people want faster gains. They do worst in bear markets, when they can fall 90%+ and stay there for years.

• Fear & Greed index (on the Markets page): extreme greed is a warning light, not a green light.
• Bitcoin dominance falling while prices rise usually means money is moving into riskier coins.
• When meme coins are on TV and your relatives are buying, the season is usually closer to its end than its start.

1. Start with money you could lose without it changing your month. Bills, rent, savings and an emergency fund come first, always.
2. Keep meme coins a small slice of whatever you have in crypto. Many experienced traders keep each single meme position to 1 to 5% of their crypto money.
3. Never borrow, never use leverage, never chase losses with more money.

The hardest part isn't buying, it's selling. Decide your sells before you buy. A common approach is a ladder:

After taking back your initial money, what's left is "house money". It removes a lot of stress and stops a winner from turning into a loser. The Playbook builds your own ladder.

DEXs don't have reliable stop-loss orders like stock apps, so you need a rule you'll actually follow, for example:

• "If it falls 50% from where I bought, I sell" (or a price alert that tells you).
• "If the reason I bought is gone (dev sold, community dead, scam news), I sell, whatever the price."
• "I never add money to a losing position."

Set a price alert at your exit level on the Alerts page so you don't have to watch charts all day.

Meme coin apps are built to make you feel you're missing out. Common traps:

• FOMO: buying because it already went up 300% today. You're usually someone else's exit.
• Revenge trading: after a loss, rushing into a bigger bet to win it back.
• Diamond hands: refusing to sell anything because "it's going to the moon".
• Screen addiction: checking prices every few minutes, at night, at work.

Antidotes: write a one-line reason and a sell plan for every buy, set fixed times to check (the Alerts page can remind you), and treat crypto like any other habit with limits. You can track "no impulse trades today" as a habit in HabitSync.

In most countries crypto gains are taxable, and the rules differ. For example, in France swapping one crypto for another isn't taxed but selling for euros is; in the US every swap counts. Keep a record of every buy and sell (date, amount, price), or use a crypto tax tool that reads your wallet. If unsure, ask a tax professional in your country.

• Hard rug: the creator removes the liquidity pool or mints new tokens and sells. Price goes to zero in seconds.
• Soft rug: the team slowly sells their tokens and goes quiet.
• Pump-and-dump: a group buys early, then influencers or group chats hype it so newcomers buy, and the group sells into them.
• Paid promotion: many "calls" from influencers are paid, or they bought before posting and sell right after.

On-chain investigators like ZachXBT (in the feed panel) regularly expose these. Following them is a great free education.

• Wallet drainers: a website asks you to "connect" and "claim" or "verify". Signing gives it permission to empty your wallet.
• Fake airdrops: random tokens or NFTs appear in your wallet with a link to "claim". Ignore them; don't try to sell them.
• Look-alike sites: jup-ag.com, uniswap-app.org… Use bookmarks, never search ads.
• Fake support: anyone who DMs you first to "help" is a scammer. Real support never DMs first and never asks for your seed phrase.
• Address poisoning: scammers send you tiny amounts from an address that looks like one you use. Always copy addresses from your own saved contacts, and check the whole address.

1. Seed phrase on paper, stored safely. Never digital.
2. Savings in a separate wallet (ideally a hardware wallet) that never connects to new sites.
3. Small "burner" wallet for trying new coins.
4. Authenticator-app 2FA on exchanges and email.
5. Monthly: revoke old approvals (revoke.cash), update wallet apps, check for unknown connected sites.
6. Never install "trading bots" or browser extensions from people in chats.

The Alerts page can put the monthly check in your calendar.