Ethereum's Meme Season is back

This round of Ethereum memes begins with a puppy and a reply from Elon Musk.

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

Musk’s reply was just four words: “Will answer shortly.”

On-chain traders, with keen instincts, immediately took action. They found a memecoin called $ASTEROID on Ethereum, which had existed for 19 months with almost no attention. But that day, it surged over 1,000% within six hours. Someone invested 1 ETH and withdrew $470k three hours later. This wealth explosion spread rapidly on social media, triggering a new wave of FOMO.

Subsequently, Ethereum mainnet gas fees soared from 0.052 Gwei, then stabilized around 0.6 Gwei over the following days, increasing more than tenfold. The number of trading pairs on Uniswap V2 began to surge, with 24-hour trading volume in the meme sector surpassing mainstream DeFi protocols in the short term.

Gas fees are a good barometer. They tell us: Ethereum’s meme season has returned. Today, let’s examine the features of this batch of Ethereum memes and their respective narrative logics.

Mascot Concept

$ASTEROID , this dog, is hot not only because Musk mentioned it but also because it has a “real physical existence”: it has actually flown into space, with photos and mission records that can be verified. Unlike ordinary fabricated memes, it has a tangible real-world anchor.

This logic then spawned a series of new projects themed around “real existing mascots”:

For example, $RISE is holding the NASA flag, claiming to be the “NASA official mascot.” Of course, NASA has not authorized any token—this is a standard “riding on official imagery” move. But the narrative is clear: space agency + American symbols + $ASTEROID riding the wave afterward. Within days of launch, its market cap exceeded $900k, making it the most liquid project in this space-themed wave.

Another example, $FLOAT , directly reused $ASTEROID ’s core prop: the zero-gravity indicator. The project is called “SpaceX Zero-G Squad,” with a website at floatsquad.xyz. The idea is to turn the ritual represented by ASTEROID (throwing a plush toy into the spaceship before launch to confirm weightlessness) into a collective narrative. It surged over 2000% in 24 hours but remains very small in size and is currently in a correction phase.

“Before each spaceship launch, a plush toy is thrown to confirm zero gravity.”

There’s another outlier in space narratives. Instead of following the space theme, $CLUTCH piggybacks on another real event: the upcoming FIFA World Cup opening on June 11, 2026. Clutch, officially released by FIFA, is the US team mascot—a white-headed eagle wearing jersey number 10.

The $CLUTCH project team directly linked the official FIFA mascot page URL on their website, a blatant move. Clearly, this meme is betting on a “calendar catalyst”: as the event approaches, external events will continue to drive traffic. Its 24-hour surge once exceeded 43,000%, but its market cap remains under $700k, still in very early stages.

Besides the mascot concept, $ASTEROID also reignited Elon Musk and Tesla concepts, such as $RIZO.

Rizo’s narrative is of a hedgehog, originally created as a corporate mascot by Spanish insurance company Génesis Seguros in 2008. The hedgehog makes an “OK” gesture, with a friendly expression, initially just commercial material. Around 2013, netizens turned it into the “haha yes” meme series—widely spread as reaction images with various affirmative captions expressing “this is right” or “I’m satisfied.”

In 2019, Musk incorporated it into Tesla’s product experience: the Model Y purchase confirmation page featured this hedgehog with the caption “S3XY.” Over the following years, Rizo appeared in Tesla’s limited Cyber Beer bottle textures, Easter eggs on the Texas Gigafactory flagpole (visible only via drone footage), a cyberpunk version on the Cybertruck purchase page, and on Tesla’s official T-shirts.

This is a meme symbol repeatedly confirmed by Musk himself, not just fan interpretation. The $RIZO memecoin’s logic is built on this relationship. Its current market cap approaches $200k, with a 28% rebound in the past hour.

Meme IPs in Comics

Pepe Frog’s Brother, MYSTERY

Pepe Frog creator Matt Furie

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

The main animal characters in “The Night Riders”

In Furie’s NFT series HEDZ, there’s also a character called Mystery, depicted as him wearing an orange hoodie—somewhat a self-portrait or a declaration of identity.

The $MYSTERY community’s narrative framework is just one sentence: “You missed PEPE, here’s your second chance.”

This phrase resonates in crypto circles not because it’s logically sound but because everyone who experienced PEPE’s rise remembers the feeling of “not daring to buy” at the time. That fear is precisely evoked. The marketing team behind $MYSTERY has collaborated with the team behind Brett (currently valued at about $2 billion), providing some backing. Its market cap is close to $1.9 million, making it one of the most liquid projects among these new launches, with over a million dollars traded in 24 hours.

FLORK and Its Derivative Universe

Among all these new projects, $FLORK is also an IP unrelated to crypto itself but capable of experiencing rapid growth in a short period. It surged nearly 6,000% in six hours, with over $8 million traded in 24 hours.

Flork of Cows is a webcomic started in 2012 by Brian DiAntonio. Its art style is extremely crude—MS Paint-style abstract little figures, resembling unfinished sock puppets, with existential daily humor. Its “low-cost but highly engaging” vibe is similar to early Rage Comics or Trollface but has lasted longer because Flork’s content is universal; anyone from any cultural background can see themselves in those absurd little figures. It’s especially popular in Latin America, becoming part of everyday emotional language on Spanish-language internet.

The ETH version of $FLORK ’s contract was created in April 2023, lay dormant for three years, then suddenly exploded. Its market cap approaches $10 million, making it a main target among these new projects.

Its surge has also driven the expansion of the “Flork universe.” $FLORKY is the recently launched female version of Flork. Female characters occasionally appear in Flork of Cows comics; this version surged 1,331% in six hours and has an Instagram account. $BABYFLORK is a baby version, with a 24-hour increase of 1,722%. The “main project → derivative baby/girl” pathway is a common expansion logic for major IPs, reflecting a mature meme ecosystem.

Political Memes, MAGA Variants

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

$MAGA, short for Make Aliens Great Again, twists Trump’s campaign slogan into a wordplay, recently linked with UFO/alien narratives. This isn’t random: in 2025, the US government will begin systematically releasing UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) files. This aligns with conspiracy theories, Tucker Carlson’s audience, and MAGA political symbols in the English crypto scene.

The meme coin’s official website links directly to aliens.gov, the US government’s official UAP disclosure page. This “directly referencing official assets” approach is similar to $CLUTCH linking to the FIFA site or using NASA imagery—both are narrative techniques.

There’s also $BRITAIN, a meme following the UK version of MAGA, referencing the political aftermath of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party’s unexpected rise in the 2024 election. “Restore Britain” is an actual political slogan. The TikTok account associated with this meme targets a right-wing audience outside crypto. Its 24-hour increase is 220%, relatively moderate but more stable than other very new projects. It has been online for days, with balanced buying and selling, showing signs of ongoing activity.

However, political memes carry risks: their audiences are fixed, and their ability to break out beyond that circle is weaker than purely cultural memes. But community cohesion is often stronger, making them less likely to disintegrate quickly when market sentiment cools.

An Observation

This is very different from Solana’s gaming scene.

Communities pointed out on April 18 that: memes on Solana are PvP—fast in and out, mainly traders competing with each other, with on-chain lifespans measured in hours. Ethereum memes are different; they are slower but tend to accumulate richer narratives. PEPE has built a community over years on Ethereum, and SHIB has created its own Layer 2.

The activation of this Ethereum meme wave is precisely at a unique window: after EIP-4844, gas is no longer a barrier, but Layer 2 solutions divert some mainnet traffic, making on-chain flow particularly scarce. When genuinely hot projects emerge, capital concentration effects will be even stronger than before.

Most of these memes will eventually fade, but the narratives and perspectives they generate are highly meaningful for memory.

Note: All tokens mentioned above are purely community-driven speculative assets, with no audits, no roadmaps, used only for case analysis, and do not constitute any investment advice.