Solana Memecoin Breakdowns · 01
A Dog In A Hat
Went To $4.58 Billion.
Episode one of a series breaking down Solana memecoins. What WIF actually was, what the chart actually did, and what I was doing in Tulum while it happened.
dogwifhat, ticker WIF, is a Solana memecoin launched in November 2023 by an anonymous team, built on a 2019 photograph of a Shiba Inu wearing a pink knitted hat. It bottomed at $0.001555 on 12 December 2023 and peaked at $4.83 on 31 March 2024, a market capitalisation of $4.58 billion. Supply is fixed at 998,926,392 tokens.
All Time Low
12 December 2023, weeks after launch. Source: CoinGecko.
All Time High
31 March 2024. A market cap of $4.58 billion on the same day.
Low To High
The two figures above, divided. 110 days between them.
Total Supply
Fixed. All of it circulating, nothing vested, nothing held back.
The Timeline
Fourteen dated events, from the photograph to this month. Everything between them is noise, and the noise is most of what you would have read at the time.
Two prices, both from CoinGecko. The dashed line is a straight join between them, not the path the price took.
-
2018
The Dog In The Photograph
The Shiba Inu in the image is a female dog called Achi, originally named Chi-Chi, born on 15 September 2018. Decrypt dates the knitted beanie photograph itself to 17 November 2018, taken by Achi's South Korean owners, which is about two months after her birth. When the picture was auctioned as an Ethereum NFT it sold for 1,210.759 ETH, then worth $4,311,234, to the pseudonymous trader GCR. Source: Decrypt, 18 March 2024.
-
November 2023
The Token Shipped With No Named Deployer
WIF was deployed on Solana at the mint address . Decrypt states that the creators remain completely anonymous, with no information about them online, and Solana Compass records mint authority and freeze authority as permanently removed, a fixed supply of roughly 998.8 million tokens, and no presale, vesting or insider allocation. No source found gives a day of the month, only November 2023, so the day is not narrowed here. Sources: Decrypt; Solana Compass.
-
December 12, 2023
Where The Aggregators Put The Low
CoinGecko records an all time low of $0.001555 on 12 December 2023. CoinMarketCap disagrees, listing an all time low of $0.00002344 on 20 November 2023, which is also roughly where its price history for WIF begins. Both figures are given here because the two aggregators do not reconcile. Sources: CoinGecko, 4 September 2026; CoinMarketCap, 4 September 2026.
-
March 5, 2024
Binance Opened Spot Trading
Binance opened WIF spot trading at 14:00 UTC on 5 March 2024 across WIF/BTC, WIF/USDT, WIF/FDUSD and WIF/TRY, with a Seed Tag applied and withdrawals opening 24 hours later. Kraken had already opened WIF spot trading against USD and EUR on 1 February 2024. Sources: Binance announcement, 5 March 2024; Kraken blog, 1 February 2024.
-
March 31, 2024
Two Aggregators, Two Peaks
CoinGecko puts the all time high at $4.83 and CoinMarketCap at $4.85, both dated 31 March 2024. Coinpaprika agrees with CoinGecko at $4.83 on the same date. Sources: CoinGecko; CoinMarketCap; Coinpaprika, all read 4 September 2026.
-
August 17, 2024
The First Deep Drawdown
Cointelegraph reported WIF down about 30% from a 9 August local top near $1.95 to $1.36, with 30 day returns of roughly minus 42%. It attributed the fall to profit taking after a year to date gain of about 708%, long liquidations of $6.93m against $3.16m of shorts over nine days, and a broad memecoin decline alongside Dogecoin, Shiba Inu and Pepe. Source: Cointelegraph, 17 August 2024.
-
November 13, 2024
Coinbase Added WIF To Its Roadmap
The Block reported that Coinbase announced plans to list WIF, sending the token up roughly 21% to $4.13 on 24 hour volume of $3.9bn. Coinbase said trading on the WIF/USD pair would launch in phases once sufficient supply was established, so a single clean go-live date is not on the record. Source: The Block, 13 November 2024.
-
November 26, 2024
Robinhood Switched It On
Robinhood added WIF for US customers, taking its listed crypto assets to 20, with chief executive Vlad Tenev confirming the listing after a teaser post. WIF spiked to $3.57 within minutes and was trading around $3.35 shortly afterwards. Source: The Crypto Basic, 26 November 2024.
-
February 4, 2025
Lowest In Nearly A Year
CCN reported WIF at $0.79, its weakest level since 25 February 2024, with open interest down to $157.58m from more than $600m during the November 2024 rally. The same piece put the March 2024 market capitalisation peak at about $4.5bn. Source: CCN, 4 February 2025.
-
March 31, 2025
The Sphere Money Went Back
Decrypt reported that the dogwifhat team abandoned the Las Vegas Sphere plan and would refund the crowdfunded pot, identified as $697,800 in USDC, with refunds starting 1 April 2025. A Sphere spokesperson said the venue never had a deal with dogwifhat, that its agency had only one very preliminary conversation early the previous year, and objected to the project using its name. Source: Decrypt, 1 April 2025.
-
June 24, 2025
A Validator Node On Solana
DeFi Development Corp and the dogwifhat community announced a dedicated Solana validator, described in the announcement as a first for a memecoin on the network, intended to seek stake delegation through the Solana Foundation Delegation Program and share rewards with holders. WIF traded between roughly $0.78 and $0.95 in the week that followed. Sources: GlobeNewswire, 24 June 2025; Unchained; cryptonews.com, 3 July 2025.
-
May 6, 2026
Upbit Opened Three Markets
Upbit listed WIF across its KRW, BTC and USDT markets, with deposits and withdrawals on Solana only. crypto.news recorded WIF at $0.241142, up 25.35% on the day, on 24 hour volume of $217.36m and a market capitalisation of $240.9m. CCN, covering the same listing, reported a move of about 30%. Sources: crypto.news, 6 May 2026; CCN, 6 May 2026.
-
August 2026
The Post-Peak Low
The weakest level since the 2024 peak was set in mid August 2026, but the aggregators do not agree on the figure or the day: CoinCodex records $0.1357 on 16 to 17 August 2026 while CoinLore records $0.1343 as the 2026 low with a daily low of $0.1345 on 18 August 2026. Neither is below the 2023 all time low, which still stands. Sources: CoinCodex; CoinLore, both read 4 September 2026.
-
September 1, 2026
Card Purchases Coded As Digital Media
The Block ran test purchases of WIF by credit card through Apple Pay on the Robinhood Wallet and Fomo apps and found them coded as MCC 5815, the merchant category for digital media rather than crypto, which earned normal card rewards. Chase opened a case with Visa saying the transactions should not have earned rewards, Mastercard declined to endorse or reject the practice, and the New York Attorney General's office said it was reviewing the matter. As of 4 September 2026 WIF traded at about $0.21 for a market capitalisation of roughly $213m to $215m on a circulating supply near 999 million. Sources: The Block, 1 September 2026; CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap, 4 September 2026.
What It Looked Like From Tulum
I was in Tulum while this was running. Not trading it from a desk with six monitors, sitting in Mexico watching a chart do something charts are not supposed to do.
It doubled most days for about ten days. That is the part people who were not there do not believe, and the part people who were there do not need explained. You would check it in the morning, go and do something with the whole day, come back in the evening and the number would be roughly twice what it was.
What that does to your judgement is the actual story. A daily double stops feeling like a market and starts feeling like a rule. You begin to plan around it continuing. Ten days is long enough to learn the wrong lesson, and the wrong lesson is that this is what happens now.
It ran for another three months after that and then it stopped, on a specific day, and the specific day is 31 March 2024. Nobody rang a bell. The number just never went higher again.
What The Run Was Actually Made Of
Five things that were true of WIF and are not true of most of what gets pitched as the next one.
The Image Was Already Famous
The hat dog had been circulating since 2019. The coin did not have to build an audience, it attached to one that already existed for free.
The Supply Was Boring
Fixed at 998,926,392, fully circulating, nothing vesting. There was no unlock schedule hanging over it, which removes the single most common way these things die quietly.
The Exchange Ladder Was The Engine
Solana DEX, then centralised listings, then a Binance perpetual in January 2024. Each rung multiplies who can buy it without changing anything about the coin.
It Became A Bet On Solana Itself
By early 2024 WIF was the thing people bought to express a view on the chain, not on the dog. The ticker stopped being the point.
Reflexivity Did The Rest
The price rising was the reason to write about it, and being written about was the reason it rose. That loop runs in both directions, which is the part that gets left out.
The Chart, And The Contract
The chart lives on DexScreener and will not render inside another page, so this links out to it rather than showing you a box that never loads. The contract sits beside it so you can check the chart is the token this page is about.
Check the contract against the chart before you trust either. On both chains there is always a different token using the same name.
The Lore
Three things that happened around WIF that are not on the chart and are not in the timeline above. Every one of them is dated and sourced.
-
January 2024
The Sphere Campaign, Led By Ansem
A campaign to put the dog on the Las Vegas Sphere was led by Ansem, the crypto influencer whose real name is Zion Thomas, with four collaborators. By March 2024 it had raised the $650,000 quoted for a week of advertising. Source: DL News.
-
March 18, 2024
The Photograph Sold For $4.3 Million
The owners of Achi, the Shiba Inu in the pink hat, auctioned the original photograph as an NFT on Foundation. It closed at 1,210 ETH, about $4.3 million, to Gigantic Rebirth Ventures. The auction was on Ethereum. The defining Solana memecoin of the cycle had its source image sold on the other chain, thirteen days before WIF topped. Source: nft now.
-
July 2026
Ansem Said How He Pitched It
In a Market Bubble interview Ansem described getting around the venue’s rules on crypto advertising: "So what we were trying to do to get around it, is like, oh no, it’s just a dog with a hat, it’s not a coin. It’s just like a dog." Source: Protos, reporting his own account.
What I Take From It
Not advice. What I would tell myself in a hammock in Tulum in March 2024.
A Daily Double Is Data About Positioning, Not Value
Nothing about a dog in a hat changed between December and March. What changed was who could buy it and how badly they wanted to. Price that moves on access is a different animal to price that moves on cash flow, and it unwinds the same way it built.
The Top Is Only Obvious In Hindsight
Every single day in that run looked exactly like the day before it, including the last one. If your plan requires you to identify the top on the day, you do not have a plan.
The Community Treasury Is A Warning Label
Holders crowdfunded a billboard on the Las Vegas Sphere, reached the $650,000 quoted fee by March 2024, and the advert never ran. The Sphere said it never had a deal. The money sat untouched for about a year and $697,800 was refunded from 1 April 2025. Nobody stole anything, which is the point: money moves faster than delivery in this asset class even when everyone is honest.
Size It So The Story Is Survivable
The interesting version of this story is the one you can tell either way. If the outcome of a memecoin position changes your year, the position was the mistake and the coin is incidental.
Every row in the timeline carries its own date and its own publication, and those are the sources. Supply, contracts, all time highs and all time lows come from CoinGecko, cross checked against CoinMarketCap and Coinpaprika. Where the aggregators disagree, both figures are printed and each is named in the row. Where a date is reported only as a month or a range it is written that way rather than narrowed. Direct quotations are reproduced from the reporting and attributed to the person who said them. Any price or market capitalisation in a row is a dated snapshot, not a live figure. Nothing on this page is a price forecast.
Common Questions
A memecoin on Solana launched in November 2023 by an anonymous team, based on a 2019 photograph of a Shiba Inu wearing a pink knitted hat. It has no product, no revenue and no roadmap, which is the category working as intended rather than a criticism of it.
$4.83 on 31 March 2024, at a market capitalisation of $4.58 billion, according to CoinGecko. Its all time low was $0.001555 on 12 December 2023, which makes the low to high move about 3,106x across 110 days.
998,926,392, fixed, with all of it circulating. There is no vesting schedule and no future unlock, which is unusual enough in this category to be worth checking first on anything else you look at.
on Solana. Verify it against a source you trust before you touch anything. Copying a contract address out of a reply is how most people lose money on this chain, and no page including this one is a safe source on its own.
No. The campaign was led by the influencer Ansem, whose real name is Zion Thomas, and reached the $650,000 quoted fee by March 2024. A Sphere spokesperson later said "We have never had a deal with Dogwifhat, and our agency at the time only had one very preliminary conversation early last year." The campaign was abandoned on 31 March 2025 and $697,800 in USDC was refunded to donors from the following day.
He led the campaign to put the dog on the Las Vegas Sphere, with four collaborators, and in a July 2026 interview he described how he pitched it to get around the venue’s rules on crypto advertising: "So what we were trying to do to get around it, is like, oh no, it’s just a dog with a hat, it’s not a coin. It’s just like a dog." That is his own account of it.
Not one that appears in any reachable source. The legal thread in this category runs through the artwork rather than the token: the CHILLGUY artist filed copyright takedowns against that coin, the owner of the cat in Shark Cat issued cease and desist notices, and TROLL went and bought an exclusive licence. WIF is the case where the photograph was simply sold, for 1,210 ETH, on Ethereum.
No. It is a breakdown of something that already happened, written by someone who was watching it happen. Memecoins are the highest risk thing in a high risk asset class and most of them go to zero. Nothing on this page is a recommendation to buy anything.
The Table Is Live.
This Page Is History.
The top twenty five refreshes every hour. This one is a record of something that already finished, which is the only kind of memecoin analysis worth writing down.
Not financial advice.