Meme Coin Mania Over? Why DOGE & SHIB Lag While ETH Soars

In the booming crypto universe, what attracts investors can change as quickly as the market. Pulling Token offers sharp insights into utility and governance tokens, vesting schedules, launchpad activity, and whale wallet movements—your guide to smarter token analysis. Lately, other utility-free and meme coins have failed to follow, like Dogecoin (DOGE) and Shiba Inu (SHIB). Meanwhile, ETH-based utility tokens such as Uniswap (UNI) and Remittix are becoming more popular and are doing extremely well. We attempt to unpack what’s behind this divergence in this article. Beyond that, it provides a fascinating glimpse into the rapidly evolving tastes of crypto investors and underscores the increasing hunger for projects with real-world utility.
The Rise of Utility Tokens
Utility tokens are a much cry from cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. In contrast to Bitcoin, utility tokens are not mineable and are usually created on third-party blockchains – most famously Ethereum. For one, token holders are granted unique privileges within a given company’s ecosystem. These benefits range from early access to new products to other exclusive perks.
By comparison, investors have proven to be far more curious about utility tokens. This trend is indicative of their determination to back the businesses driving social change and building sustainable profit. In this context, remarkable growth in the global impact investing market has taken place. It jumped from $114 billion in 2017 to a stunning $228 billion in 2018. This demonstrates a growing wish to make investments that align with individual values and overall objectives. Utility tokens address this need with real-world use cases and robust governance structures.
Retail investors in particular have grown more attracted to utility tokens. These tokens provide rights of ownership or access to particular services and goods inside an ecosystem powered by blockchain technology. This is in opposition to meme coins, which tend to create value solely based on community perception and social media buzz. The change is indicative of a maturing market where investors are looking for actual value and proven use cases in the real world.
Ethereum's Robust Ecosystem
A large part of utility tokens’ success on Ethereum comes down to the enormous ecosystem that Ethereum enjoys. Ethereum is the home of major innovations. Ethereum has emerged as the leading platform for all sorts of innovative applications.
DeFi, NFTs, and dApps
- Decentralized Finance (DeFi): DeFi applications built on Ethereum provide financial instruments that bypass traditional intermediaries like brokerages and banks, offering services like lending, borrowing, and trading in a decentralized manner.
- Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs): Ethereum introduced the ERC-721 standard, becoming the epicenter of a multi-billion dollar digital collectibles market, enabling artists and creators to tokenize unique assets.
- Decentralized Applications (dApps): Ethereum allows developers to deploy decentralized applications, enabling users to interact with blockchain-based services like CryptoKitties, a game featuring digital cat artwork as NFTs.
- Enterprise Adoption: The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, with its growing membership, indicates increasing interest among enterprises in leveraging Ethereum-based solutions for various business applications.
Ethereum’s blockchain is a very powerful tool. Because of that focus on supporting genuine, substantive, real-world projects—that’s what gets investors excited about it, more substance than hype.
Solana's Meme Coin Surge vs. Ethereum's Challenges
Ethereum-based utility tokens, as a recent example, have been on a roll for weeks. Meme coins on the Solana blockchain network have bucked the trend altogether. Solana meme coins have averaged over 20,000% returns YTD, far surpassing Ethereum’s turns. Much of this increase is due to around Solana’s technical features.
Solana's Advantages
- Transaction Speed: Solana can process over 65,000 transactions per second (TPS) compared to Ethereum’s current capacity of around 15–30 TPS, giving Solana a significant advantage in terms of speed.
- Low Transaction Fees: Solana has incredibly low transaction fees, averaging just $0.00025 per transaction, compared to Ethereum's high gas fees, which can soar to $20 or more during network congestion.
- Scalability and Performance: Solana's architecture allows it to handle high transaction volumes without sacrificing performance, making it highly scalable.
- Network Congestion: Ethereum has faced persistent network congestion issues, leading to slower transactions and higher fees during peak activity, whereas Solana's high throughput minimizes congestion.
Solana-based meme coins have made some very lucky traders early 2023 multipliers of up to. That said, their long-term sustainability is highly debatable compared to utility tokens that offer inherent value and real-world applications.
Navigating the Shift: Investment Strategies
For investors hoping to ride this wave of change in the crypto markets, diversification and smart investment strategies will be key.
Investment Strategies
- Diversification: Holding a variety of assets helps mitigate market risk, as losses from one coin can be offset by potential gains of other assets within the portfolio.
- Dollar-Cost Averaging (DCA): Invest a fixed amount of money at regular intervals, regardless of the market's performance, to reduce the impact of volatility.
- Day Trading: An advanced investment method that involves frequent trades on one or multiple assets throughout the day, trying to profit from short-term price fluctuations.
- Moving Average (MA) Crossovers: Use two MAs with different time periods to identify potential buy and sell signals, such as the "golden cross" and "death cross".
- Relative Strength Index (RSI): A momentum indicator that measures the magnitude of recent price changes to identify overbought or oversold conditions.
Follow these tactics to get more from your investments. By taking a projects over hype approach and prioritizing strong fundamentals and real-world use cases, crypto investors can position themselves for long-term success in this ever-changing industry.
In fact, Dogecoin and Shiba Inu are falling behind Ethereum-based NFTs/utility tokens. This is a welcome and positive trend indicating that investors are understandably refocusing their attention on projects creating real value and real-world use cases. Meme coins may provide short-term gains, but it’s utility tokens that form long-term investments. They enable access to important services, offer representation and governance rights, and help meet overall market demands for equity and inclusion. The crypto market itself is maturing quickly. Investors have moved past hype and excitement into substance, creating overwhelming demand for utility tokens and the robust ecosystems that support them.

Priya Kumar
Lead Utility Token Analyst
Priya Kumar is a blockchain analyst dedicated to bringing precise, balanced reporting on utility tokens, launchpad dynamics, and DeFi innovation. She merges academic rigor with real-world insights, and her subtle wit and clarity make advanced crypto topics approachable. Outside of work, Priya enjoys classical Indian music and running local coding workshops.
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