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

Recently, SpaceX founder Elon Musk replied to media figure Glenn Beck's post on X. The post mentioned a teenage girl who designed a Shiba Inu doll named Asteroid before she passed away from cancer, sending it on the 2024 SpaceX Polaris Dawn mission. The doll served as a zero-gravity indicator on the spacecraft, being the first item to float during human entry into a weightless state. One of the girl's final wishes was for Asteroid to become SpaceX's official mascot.

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

On-chain traders acted immediately with keen insight. They found a memecoin called $ASTEROID on Ethereum, which had existed for 19 months and was almost unnoticed. However, on that day, it surged over 1,000% within six hours. Someone invested 1 ETH and, three hours later, withdrew 470,000 dollars. This wealth-making case spread rapidly on social media, triggering a new wave of FOMO.

Subsequently, the gas fee on the Ethereum mainnet climbed from 0.052 Gwei, stabilizing around 0.6 Gwei in the following days, with an increase of more than ten times. The number of trading pairs on Uniswap V2 began to surge, and the 24-hour trading volume in the meme sector temporarily surpassed that of mainstream DeFi protocols.

The gas fee serves as a good barometer. It tells us that the meme season on Ethereum has returned. Today, let's take a look at the characteristics of this batch of Ethereum memes and their respective narrative logics.

Mascot Concept

$ASTEROID the dog is popular not only because Musk gave it a nod but also because it has a "real physical presence": it has genuinely flown into space, there are photos, mission records, and it can be verified. This is different from a typical fabricated meme, as it has an anchor point in the real world.

This logic subsequently inspired a batch of new projects themed around "real existing mascot characters":

For example, $RISE is flying the NASA flag, declaring itself the "NASA official mascot." Of course, NASA hasn’t authorized any token, which is a standard "tapping into official imagery" operation. But the narrative is clear enough: space agency + American icon + smooth sailing after $ASTEROID. Just a few days after its launch, its market cap surpassed 900,000 dollars, making it the most liquid project in this wave of space concepts.

Another project, $FLOAT, directly reused the core prop from $ASTEROID: the zero-gravity indicator. The project is called "SpaceX Zero-G Squad," with the website floatsquad.xyz. The logic is to turn the ritual represented by ASTEROID (throwing a doll into the spaceship before each launch to confirm the zero-gravity state) into a collective narrative. It surged over 2000% within 24 hours, but its size is minimal, currently in a pullback.

Before each spacecraft launch, a doll is thrown to confirm the zero-gravity state

There is also an outlier in the space narrative. $CLUTCH does not follow the space theme but instead taps into another nearby real event: the FIFA World Cup, which is set to open on June 11, 2026. Clutch is the official mascot for the American team, a bald eagle wearing the number 10 jersey.

The $CLUTCH team directly linked to FIFA’s mascot page on their website, showing a blatant attitude. Clearly, this meme is betting on the "calendar catalyst," as the event approaches, external events will continue to drive traffic. It surged over 43,000% in 24 hours, but its market cap is still less than 700,000 dollars and is in its early stages.

In addition to the mascot concept, $ASTEROID has reignited the Musk and Tesla themes, such as $RIZO.

The narrative for Rizo is a hedgehog, initially created as a corporate mascot by the Spanish insurance company Génesis Seguros in 2008. The hedgehog makes an "OK" gesture, wearing a friendly expression, initially just a commercial material. Until around 2013, users turned it into the "haha yes" series of emojis, spreading widely—paired with various affirmative titles, it became a universal reaction image to express "that's right" and "I am satisfied."

Musk introduced it into Tesla's product experience in 2019: it appeared on the confirmation page for purchasing the Model Y, captioned "S3XY." In the following years, Rizo appeared in various forms, like on the limited edition Cyber Beer bottles, hidden in the Gigafactory Texas flagpole (visible only from a drone shot), in the cyberpunk version of the Cybertruck purchase confirmation page, and on Tesla official T-shirts.

This is a meme symbol that Musk himself has continually and repeatedly confirmed, not a one-sided interpretation by fans. The logic of the $RIZO memecoin is built around this relationship. Currently, its market cap is close to 200,000 dollars, with a nearly 28% rebound in about one hour.

Comic IP Produces Memes

Pepe the Frog's Brother MYSTERY

Creator of Pepe the Frog, Matt Furie

Matt Furie, the creator of Pepe the Frog, published his first book, "The Night Riders," in 1999. This is a wordless picture book featuring four animal characters: a frog, a mouse, a dragon, and a bat. For years, no one knew the name of the frog until someone unearthed a note at the end of the book, revealing its name was Mystery.

Animal characters from "The Night Riders"

Furie’s own NFT series HEDZ also features a character named Mystery, which is an avatar of him wearing an orange hoodie—somewhat a declaration of identity for the author towards this character.

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

This sentence resonates in the crypto circle, not because it logically stands up, but because everyone who experienced the PEPE market remembers the feeling of "not daring to buy" at that time. This fear is precisely summoned. The marketing team behind $MYSTERY has collaborated with the team behind Brett (valued around 2 billion dollars), providing a certain endorsement. Currently, its market cap is close to 1.9 million dollars, making it one of the most liquid projects in this new batch, with over one million dollars in 24-hour transactions.

FLORK and Its Derivative Universe

Among all these new projects, $FLORK is also an IP that is not related to crypto yet has shown the greatest surge in a short period. It surged nearly 6,000% in six hours, with over 8 million dollars in 24-hour transactions.

Flork of Cows is a web comic that has been updating since 2012, created by Brian DiAntonio. The art style is extremely simplistic, with MS Paint-style abstract figures that look like unfinished sock puppets, remarking on existence in an existential daily commentary. That "low-cost but highly relatable" aura is similar to early Rage Comics and Trollface, but it has lived longer because Flork's content is universal, allowing people from any cultural background to see themselves in those absurd little characters. It is particularly popular in Latin America, becoming one of the everyday emotional languages of the Spanish-speaking internet.

The ETH version of $FLORK had its contract created as early as April 2023, sleeping for three years until this wave arrived. Its market cap is close to 10 million dollars, making it a main target among this batch of new projects.

Its explosion subsequently led to the expansion of the "Flork Universe." $FLORKY, just launched today, is the female version of Flork. The female character that occasionally appears in Flork of Cows had a 6-hour surge of 1331% and has opened an Instagram account. $BABYFLORK is the baby version, which surged 1722% in 24 hours. This path of "main project → derivative baby/girl" is one that large IPs have typically followed, representing a highly mature expansion logic in the meme sector.

Political Memes, MAGA Variants

If the mascot concept and space narrative are emotionally driven, political memes follow a different logic: a sense of opposition and identity recognition.

$MAGA, short for Make Aliens Great Again, twists Trump’s campaign slogan by changing one word, recently intertwining with UFO/alien narratives. This is not random: in 2025, the U.S. government did start to systematically disclose UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) files, which overlaps highly with conspiracy theories, Tucker Carlson's audience, and MAGA political symbols in the English-speaking crypto circle.

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

Additionally, there is $BRITAIN, which follows a MAGA route for the UK, backgrounded by the political aftershocks left by the Reform UK party, led by Nigel Farage, unexpectedly rising in the 2024 elections. "Restore Britain" is a real political slogan. The meme's TikTok account has extended its reach to the right-wing political audience outside the crypto circle. It had a 24-hour surge of 220%, relatively moderate but with higher stability than other brand new projects in this batch, having been online for a few days with balanced trading and signs of continuous operation.

However, the risk with political memes lies in their fixed audience, which has weaker ability to break into new circles compared to purely cultural memes. Yet, community cohesion tends to be stronger, making them less likely to collapse quickly due to market cool-downs.

An Observation

This greatly differs from Solana’s gaming.

Communities pointed out this on April 18: memes on Solana are PvP: fast in and out, mainly a game among traders, with on-chain lifecycles calculated in hours. Ethereum memes, however, are somewhat different—they are slower but tend to accumulate more narrative density. PEPE established a community lasting several years on Ethereum, and SHIB made its own Layer 2 on Ethereum.

The activation of this round of Ethereum memes coincidentally falls at a particularly special window: after EIP-4844, gas fees are no longer a hurdle, but the diversion of L2 from mainnet culture also means that traffic on the mainnet is exceptionally scarce. Once something truly hot appears, the focus effect of capital will be stronger than ever.

$ASTEROID is that initial ignition device. What follows is what we see now: $MYSTERY surged tens of thousands of times overnight, $FLORK awakened after three years, and $CLUTCH awaits its calendar catalyst before the World Cup.

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

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

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