This round of Ethereum memes started with a puppy and a reply from Musk.
A few days ago, SpaceX founder Elon Musk replied to a post by media personality Glenn Beck on SpaceX. The post described how a teenage girl, before passing away from cancer, 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 on the spacecraft, being the first thing a human would float when entering weightlessness. One of the girl's last wishes was for Asteroid to become SpaceX's official mascot.
Musk's reply was only four words: "Will answer shortly."
On-chain traders, with their keen instincts, acted immediately. They found a memecoin on Ethereum called $ASTEROID, which had existed for 19 months and was virtually ignored. But that day, it surged by over 1,000% in six hours. Someone invested 1 ETH and withdrew $470,000 three hours later. This case of overnight riches spread rapidly on social media, triggering a new wave of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out).
Ethereum mainnet gas fees subsequently climbed from 0.052 Gwei, stabilizing around 0.6 Gwei for several days, representing an increase of more than tenfold. The number of trading pairs on Uniswap V2 began to surge, and the 24-hour trading volume of the meme sector surpassed that of mainstream DeFi protocols in a short period.
Gas fees are a good barometer. They're telling us that Ethereum's meme season is back. Today, let's look at the characteristics of this batch of Ethereum memes and their respective narrative logic.
Mascot concept
The reason $ASTEROID is so popular isn't just because Musk mentioned it, but also because it has a "real physical existence": it actually flew into space, there are photos, mission records, and it's verifiable. Unlike ordinary memes that are made up out of thin air, it has a real-world anchor.
This logic subsequently spurred a wave of new residential projects themed around "real-life mascot characters":
For example, $RISE uses the NASA flag, describing itself as the "official mascot of NASA." Of course, NASA hasn't authorized any tokens; this is a standard "riding on the coattails of an official image" tactic. But the narrative is clear enough: space agency + American symbol + $ASTEROID followed by a convenient association. Within days of its launch, its market capitalization exceeded $900,000, making it the most liquid project in this wave of space-related concepts.
Furthermore, $FLOAT directly reuses the core prop of $ASTEROID: the zero-gravity indicator. The project is called "SpaceX Zero-G Squad," and the website is floatsquad.xyz. Its logic is to turn the ritual represented by ASTEROID (dropping a doll into the spacecraft at each launch to confirm weightlessness) into a collective narrative. It saw a 24-hour increase of over 2000%, but its market size is extremely small, and it is currently undergoing a correction.
Before each launch, a toy is dropped to confirm the weightless state.
There's another outlier in the space narrative. $CLUTCH doesn't follow the space route, but instead piggybacks on another recent real-world event: the FIFA World Cup, which will open on June 11, 2026. Clutch is the official mascot of the US national team, a bald eagle wearing the number 10 jersey.
The $CLUTCH project team openly included the URL of FIFA's mascot page on their official website, a blatant move. Clearly, this meme is betting on a "calendar catalyst," with external events driving traffic as the tournament approaches. Its 24-hour increase once exceeded 43,000%, but its market capitalization is still less than $700,000, placing it in its very early stages.
Beyond the mascot concept, the dog $ASTEROID has reignited Musk and Tesla concepts, such as $RIZO.
Rizo's narrative revolves around a hedgehog, originally created in 2008 as a corporate mascot by the Spanish insurance company Génesis Seguros. The hedgehog, making an "OK" sign with a friendly expression, was initially just commercial material. However, around 2013, netizens created and widely disseminated the "haha yes" meme series—paired with various affirmative captions—making it a universal response image for expressing "that's right" or "I'm satisfied."
Musk incorporated the hedgehog into Tesla's product experience in 2019: it appeared on the Model Y purchase confirmation page with the caption "S3XY". In the following years, the Rizo appeared in various ways, including on the bottle pattern of Tesla's limited-edition Cyber Beer, an Easter egg on the Gigafactory Texas flagpole (which can only be seen with a drone overhead view), a cyberpunk version of the Cybertruck purchase confirmation page, and on official Tesla T-shirts.
This is a meme symbol that Musk himself has repeatedly and consistently confirmed; it's not just a fan interpretation. The logic behind $RIZO memecoin is built on this relationship. Its current market capitalization is close to $200,000, and it has rebounded by over 28% in the past hour.
The comic book industry is a breeding ground for memes.
Pepe, the frog's brother, Mystery
Matt Furie, the creator of Pepe the Frog
Matt Furie, the creator of Pepe the Frog, published his first book, *The Night Riders*, in 1999. This wordless picture book features 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.
The main animal characters in The Night Riders
In Furie's own NFT series HEDZ, there is also a character named Mystery, who is his avatar wearing an orange hood—in a sense, it is the author's own declaration of identification with this character.
The $MYSTERY community's narrative can be summarized in just one sentence: "You missed Pepe, this is your second chance."
This statement resonates within the crypto community not because it's logically sound, but because everyone who experienced the PEPE surge remembers the feeling of "not daring to buy." This fear has been precisely invoked. $MYSTERY's marketing team has partnered with the team behind Brett (whose current market capitalization is approximately $2 billion), providing a degree of endorsement. Currently valued at nearly $1.9 million, it's one of the most liquid projects among these new offerings, with over a million dollars in trading volume in 24 hours.
FLORK and its derivative universe
Of all these new listings, $FLORK stands out as a meme that, despite having no direct connection to crypto, experienced the largest price surge in a short period. It saw a nearly 6,000% increase in 6 hours and over $8 million in trading volume within 24 hours.
Flork of Cows is a webcomic series that began updating in 2012, created by Brian DiAntonio. The art style is extremely rudimentary, featuring abstract little figures in an MS Paint style, resembling unfinished sock dolls. The expressions and dialogue follow an existentialist, everyday comedic tone. Its "low-cost but incredibly addictive" quality is similar to early Rage Comics and Trollface, but it has outlasted them because Flork's content is universal; people from any cultural background can recognize themselves in those absurd little figures. It is particularly popular in Latin America, becoming part of the everyday emotional language of the Spanish-speaking internet.
The ETH version of the contract (_2024111120235_) was created back in April 2023, and after three years of dormancy, it has finally arrived. With a market capitalization approaching $10 million, it is a major player among these new projects.
Its explosive growth subsequently spurred the expansion of the "Flork universe." $FLORKY is a female version of Flork that just launched today. A female character occasionally appearing 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 1722% increase in 24 hours. This "main platform → derivative baby/girl" path has been followed by most major IPs, representing a highly mature expansion logic in the meme sector.
Political meme, MAGA variant
If mascot concepts and space narratives are driven by emotion, political memes follow a different logic: a sense of antagonism and identity recognition.
$MAGA, short for Make Aliens Great Again, is a play on Trump's campaign slogan, recently grafted onto the UFO/alien narrative. This isn't a random combination: the US government does indeed begin systematically releasing UAP (Unidentified Aerial Vehicle) files in 2025, an event that highly overlaps with conspiracy theories, Tucker Carlson's audience, and the MAGA political symbol within the English-speaking crypto community.
The official website for MME directly links to aliens.gov, the official UAP (User Application Program) information disclosure page of the US government. This practice of "directly referencing real official assets" is the same narrative technique used by $CLUTCH (which links to the FIFA website) and $RISE (which uses NASA's image).
There's also $BRITAIN, a meme that follows the UK version of MAGA, set against the backdrop of the unexpected rise of Nigel Farage's Reform UK party 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 world. It saw a 220% increase in 24 hours, relatively modest, but more stable than other very new projects in this batch. Having been online for several days, with balanced buying and selling, it shows signs of continued operation.
However, the risk of political memes lies in their fixed audience base and weaker ability to expand beyond their original niche compared to purely cultural memes. But they often exhibit stronger community cohesion and are less prone to disintegration when their popularity cools.
An observation
This is very different from Solana's games.
The community pointed this out in a tweet on April 18th: Solana memes are PvP: quick in and out, mainly a game between traders, with on-chain lifespans measured in hours. Ethereum memes are different; they are slower but tend to accumulate more narrative density. PEPE has built a community on Ethereum that has lasted for several years, and SHIB has carved out its own Layer 2 on Ethereum.
From a technical standpoint, the activation of this round of Ethereum memes happened to coincide with a special window: after EIP-4844, gas is no longer a barrier, but the diversion of L2 to the mainnet culture also means that traffic on the mainnet is extremely scarce. Once something truly popular appears, the focus of funds will be stronger than ever before.
$ASTEROID was the initial ignition point. What followed is what we see today: $MYSTERY surged tens of thousands of times overnight, $FLORK slumbered for three years before its moment arrived, and $CLUTCH awaited its calendar catalyst before the World Cup began.
Most of these memes will eventually disappear, but the narratives and perspectives they offer are still very meaningful.
Note: The tokens mentioned above are all purely community-driven speculative assets, without audits or roadmaps, and are only used for case analysis purposes. They do not constitute any investment advice.
