Dogecoin, PEPE rocket as much as 25% as 2026 starts with a bang for memecoins

• Dogecoin and Pepe led a significant meme coin rally, with Dogecoin rising 11% and Pepe surging 17% in a single day.
• The broader meme coin market is heating up, with CoinGecko's GMCI Meme Index showing a market value of $33.8 billion and a trading volume of $5.9 billion.
• Traders are speculating on meme coins as a high-risk, high-reward opportunity amid uneven liquidity and a lack of clear macroeconomic catalysts.

Dogecoin and pepe led a sharp meme coin bounce on Friday, with traders leaning into “meme season” talk as 2026 gets underway.

Dogecoin was up about 11% over 24 hours, while pepe rose roughly 17% on the day after a stronger intraday push.

Crypto’s meme basket has also been heating up more broadly. CoinGecko’s GMCI Meme Index category showed a market value of roughly $33.8 billion with about $5.9 billion in 24 hour trading volume, a sign that the move is not just a single token story.

Meanwhile, the “dog themed” basket flashing green across the board. Following dogecoin, Shiba Inu was up 8% and Solana’s Bonk added nearly 11%, while Floki climbed close to 10%.

The move was not limited to the majors and smaller caps moved faster, with Mog Coin up about 14% on the day and roughly 37% over seven days, while Popcat gained nearly 9% and is up more than 17% on the week.

Traders on X pointed to PEPE’s sharp breakout, with some charts suggesting momentum traders are chasing a familiar setup where speculative flows spill from large caps into meme coins once liquidity returns.

Why are memes popping?

Bitcoin has been range bound, liquidity is still uneven after the holidays, and traders are looking for the highest beta place to express risk on views without waiting for a clean macro catalyst.

Memes tend to benefit in that environment because they move fast, have deep derivatives markets on major venues, and attract momentum flows that do not need a fundamental narrative.

That does not automatically mean the market has entered a sustained meme cycle.

A lot of these bursts are self reinforcing in the short run, but fragile. When positioning gets crowded, spot demand thins, or bitcoin slips, meme coins can unwind quickly because the same leverage that accelerates the upside can force sharp downside de risk moves.

One way to frame it is that memes are acting like a temperature check on speculative appetite.

A “meme season index” style approach tracks how many large meme tokens are outperforming bitcoin over a set window. If that number keeps rising, it usually means traders are rotating into higher risk corners of the market rather than just buying large caps.

For now, the price action says traders are willing to take selective risk. The next signal will be whether the move spreads beyond a handful of liquid meme names, or fades as quickly as it started.

• KuCoin recorded over $1.25 trillion in total trading volume in 2025, equivalent to an average of roughly $114 billion per month, marking its strongest year on record.
• This performance translated into an all-time high share of centralised exchange volume, as KuCoin’s activity expanded faster than aggregate CEX volumes, which slowed during periods of lower market volatility.
• Spot and derivatives volumes were evenly split, each exceeding $500 billion for the year, signalling broad-based usage rather than reliance on a single product line.
• Altcoins accounted for the majority of trading activity, reinforcing KuCoin’s role as a primary liquidity venue beyond BTC and ETH at a time when majors saw more muted turnover.
• Even as overall crypto volumes softened mid-year, KuCoin maintained elevated baseline activity, indicating structurally higher user engagement rather than short-lived volume spikes.

• The U.S. captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife after a brief military operation Saturday morning, according to President Trump.
• Crypto prices suffered a brief, modest drop on the first reports of the military action, but have since recovered.

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