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

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

Musk's reply was just four words: Will answer shortly.

On-chain traders, with their keen sense of smell, immediately took action. They found a memecoin called $ASTEROID on Ethereum, which had existed for 19 months with little attention. But that day, it surged over 1,000% in six hours. Someone put in 1 ETH and cashed out $470,000 three hours later. This wealth creation story spread quickly on social media, triggering a new round of FOMO.

The gas fee on the Ethereum mainnet subsequently rose from 0.052 Gwei to 0.6 Gwei, an increase of more than tenfold, and stabilized around that level for several days. The number of Uniswap V2 trading pairs began to surge, and the 24-hour trading volume of the meme sector briefly surpassed that of mainstream DeFi protocols.

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

Mascot Concept

$ASTEROID, this dog, could ignite not only because Musk mentioned 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凭空捏造 (fabricated out of thin air) memes; it has an anchor point in the real world.

This logic subsequently spawned a batch of new projects themed around "real-existing 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 operation of "leveraging official imagery." But the narrative is clear enough: space agency + American symbol + riding the wave after $ASTEROID. After being online for a few days, its market cap has exceeded $900,000, making it the project with the deepest liquidity in this wave of space concepts.

Then there's $FLOAT, which directly reuses 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 plushie into the spacecraft before each launch to confirm weightlessness) into a group narrative. It saw a 24-hour increase of over 2000%, but its size is extremely small and is currently in a pullback.

There's also an outlier in the space narrative. $CLUTCH doesn't follow the space line but leverages another upcoming real event: the FIFA World Cup opening 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 in the URL of FIFA's mascot page in a section of their website, an unabashed posture. Clearly, this meme is betting on a "calendar catalyst"—as the event approaches, external events will continuously drive traffic in. The 24-hour increase once exceeded 43,000%, but the market cap is still less than $700,000, indicating it's in a very early stage.

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

Rizo's narrative is about a hedgehog, originally created as a corporate mascot in 2008 by the Spanish insurance company Génesis Seguros. The hedgehog makes an "OK" gesture with a kind expression, initially just commercial material. Around 2013, netizens turned it into the "haha yes" series of memes, widely spread—paired with various affirmative captions, it became a universal reaction image to express "this is right" or "I'm satisfied."

Musk brought 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 the following years, Rizo陆续 appeared on the subtle patterns of Tesla's limited Cyber Beer bottles, an Easter egg on the flagpole at Gigafactory Texas (only visible from a drone's aerial view), a cyberpunk version on the Cybertruck purchase confirmation page, and official Tesla T-shirts.

This is a meme symbol that Musk himself has持续 and repeatedly acknowledged, not a one-sided interpretation by fans. The logic of the $RIZO memecoin is built on this relationship. The current market cap is接近 $200,000, with a rebound of over 28% in the last hour.

Comic IPs Are a Rich Source of Memes

Pepe the Frog's Brother MYSTERY

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 found a note at the end of the book revealing it was called Mystery.

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

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

This sentence resonates in the crypto circle not because it's logically sound, but because everyone who experienced the PEPE行情 remembers the feeling of "not daring to buy" at that time. This fear is precisely summoned. The marketing team behind $MYSTERY has partnered with the team behind Brett (Brett's current market cap is about $2 billion), which provides some endorsement. The current market cap is接近 $1.9 million, making it one of the projects with the thickest liquidity in this batch of new launches, with 24-hour trading volume exceeding one million dollars.

FLORK and Its Derivative Universe

Among all these new launches, $FLORK is also an IP that, while本身 unrelated to crypto, saw the largest short-term surge. It rose nearly 6,000% in 6 hours, with 24-hour trading volume exceeding $8 million.

Flork of Cows is a webcomic that started updating in 2012, created by Brian DiAntonio. The art style is extremely simple, featuring abstract stick figures in an MS Paint style that look like unfinished sock puppets, with expressions and dialogues following an existentialist daily吐槽 (roasting) route. That "low-cost but highly addictive" vibe is similar to early Rage Comics,类似 Trollface, but it has survived longer because Flork's content is universal; people from any cultural background can recognize themselves in those absurd little characters. It's especially popular in Latin America, becoming part of the daily emotional language of the Spanish-speaking internet.

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

Its爆发 subsequently led to the expansion of the "Flork universe." $FLORKY is a female version of Flork that just launched today. Female characters occasionally appear in the Flork of Cows comics. It saw a 1331% increase in 6 hours and even opened an Instagram account. $BABYFLORK is the baby version, with a 24-hour increase of 1722%. This path of "main coin →衍生 baby / girl" has basically been tread by all major IPs and is a highly mature expansion logic in the meme sector.

Political Memes, MAGA Variants

If the mascot concept and space narrative are driven by emotion, political memes follow another logic: opposition and identity.

$MAGA, short for Make Aliens Great Again, twists Trump's campaign slogan by changing one word,嫁接 (grafting) it onto the recent UFO/alien narrative. This isn't random拼凑 (piecing together): in 2025, the U.S. government did begin systematically releasing UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) files, an event that highly overlaps with conspiracy theories, Tucker Carlson's audience, and MAGA political symbols in the English-speaking crypto circle.

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

There's also $BRITAIN, a meme that follows the UK version of the MAGA route, against the backdrop of the political aftershocks from Nigel Farage's Reform UK party's unexpected rise in the 2024 general election. "Restore Britain" is a real political slogan. The meme's TikTok account reaches out to right-wing political audiences outside the crypto circle. The 24-hour increase is 220%, relatively moderate, but its stability is higher than other very new projects in this batch. It has been online for several days, with balanced buying and selling, showing signs of continuous operation.

However, the risk with political memes is that their audience is fixed, and their ability to break through circles is weaker than purely cultural memes. But community cohesion is often stronger, making them less likely to quickly disintegrate when the market cools.

An Observation

This is very different from the Solana game.

Communities pointed this out on April 18th: Memes on Solana are PvP: fast in and out, mainly a game between traders, with an on-chain lifecycle measured in hours. Memes on Ethereum are different; they are slower but tend to accumulate more narrative density. PEPE built a community lasting years on Ethereum, SHIB developed its own Layer 2 on Ethereum.

From a technical condition perspective, the activation of this round of Ethereum memes恰好 occurred in a special window: after EIP-4844, gas is no longer a barrier, but the分流 (diversion) of traffic to L2 also means that traffic on the mainnet is格外 scarce. Once something truly hot appears, the资金聚焦效应 (capital focusing effect) will be stronger than before.

$ASTEROID was the initial ignition device. What followed is what we see now: $MYSTERY rose tens of thousands of times overnight, $FLORK waited three years for its moment, $CLUTCH awaits its calendar catalyst before the World Cup opens.

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

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