Memecoin Crash: Why Dogecoin and Shiba Inu Fell, and Where Money Went

Since December 2024, the memecoin market has lost about 79% of its value, falling from around $150 billion to around $31 billion. If you hold Dogecoin, Shiba Inu or another memecoin, your position is probably down hard.

The video argues the money didn’t simply leave crypto. Holders gave up on the reasons they were holding, and the capital rotated into a few other areas. This article covers why the biggest memecoins lost support, and where the video says the money went.

How far have memecoins fallen?

The decline hit the whole category at once, not one failed coin. Figures cited in the video:

Coin	Distance below its high
Dogecoin (DOGE)	about 89% below its 2021 high; down about 31% this year
Shiba Inu (SHIB)	about 94% below its October 2021 high
Floki	about 93% below its high
Bonk, WIF, Pepe	between 88% and 96% below their highs

Floki’s drop came even after it got an exchange-traded product in Europe the previous October. The video’s broader point is that memecoins tend to be hit hardest in a bear market.

Why did Dogecoin lose support?

The video identifies two reasons holders kept buying Dogecoin, and both faded.

1. The Elon Musk thesis. For years, the case was that Musk would eventually build Dogecoin into his companies.

• On February 3, asked about putting Dogecoin on the moon, Musk said “maybe next year.” The video notes the price barely reacted.
• On June 26, Musk launched X Money, the payment system inside X, with dollars only and no Dogecoin option. X’s head of product, Nikita Bier, said X doesn’t currently execute trades.
• In the OpenAI trial in April, Musk described most crypto assets as scams, according to the video.
• The Department of Government Efficiency, whose acronym DOGE the market had traded on, also faded. Musk left in May 2025, and by November a senior federal personnel official said the department didn’t exist.

2. Wall Street never really arrived. The first US Dogecoin ETF launched on September 18, 2025. When Grayscale launched its Dogecoin ETF in November, a Bloomberg analyst had predicted $12 million on day one; it did $1.4 million. All US Dogecoin ETFs together now hold around $25 million, compared with about $1.6 billion or more in the XRP ETFs.

Two more signals: Bitwise is closing its Dogecoin ETF, with a last trading day of October 14, 2026. And a Nasdaq-listed company that had built a treasury of 733 million DOGE sold the rest of it, three days before the year’s low.

Why did Shiba Inu fall further?

Shiba Inu had a stronger case than most memecoins because it was building Shibarium, a separate network that runs on Ethereum where transactions cost cents rather than dollars. A token with a network people use has a reason to exist beyond its price.

That case weakened in stages, per the video:

1. On September 12 of the previous year, the Shibarium bridge was exploited and over $4.1 million was taken. Users lost trust.
2. In February, K9 Finance, one of the main projects on Shibarium, shut down all its Shibarium products. Value locked in the network fell from about $6.4 million to around $50,000, about 99%.
3. The lead developer started building an AI app and, according to the video, hadn’t posted since May 13, which many took as the project being abandoned.

Why are investors avoiding memecoins in general?

Because many have been burned repeatedly. The video cites:

• Solidus Labs found 98.6% of tokens launched on Pump.fun, the largest memecoin launchpad, were rug pulls or pump-and-dumps.
• Research cited in the video found nearly 990,000 wallets that bought the TRUMP coin were down about $3.8 billion.
• MemeCore lost around $3 billion in value in 30 minutes on June 25.

When Dogecoin, the category’s flagship, falls this hard, the video argues, many holders see it as a signal to leave the whole sector, especially in a falling market.

Where did the money go?

The video names three areas that grew while memecoins declined:

1. Prediction markets. Platforms where users bet on yes-or-no outcomes such as elections or interest rates. Kalshi and Polymarket together did a record $50.6 billion of volume in July and another $45 billion in August. Expectations around the Clarity Act were a big driver.
2. Hyperliquid. An exchange now handling hundreds of billions of dollars in trades a month. On August 19, President Trump named Hyperliquid at the White House, and its HYPE token rose 11% that day.
3. Zcash. A privacy coin many had written off, which the video says is up more than 2,000% over the past 12 months.

Why some holders are staying

The video lists a few reasons some investors haven’t left:

• According to the video, the March 17 SEC and CFTC interpretation listed Dogecoin and Shiba Inu, along with XRP, as digital commodities.
• On September 9, T. Rowe Price, which manages about $1.8 trillion, filed for a crypto ETF allowed to hold both Dogecoin and Shiba Inu.
• Dogecoin had its best month of the year in August, up about 21% from its low.

Dogecoin co-creator Billy Markus has called this bear market boring and said such periods have historically lasted three to four years for memecoins.

What to watch next

The video doesn’t declare memecoins dead; it expects some form of them to return in a later cycle. Its lesson is about rotation: the warning signs for Dogecoin and Shiba Inu were public as they happened, from X Money’s launch to Shibarium’s falling liquidity to weak ETF demand.

Signals worth tracking from here:

• Dogecoin ETF assets and whether more funds close after Bitwise’s October 14 exit.
• Any sign of Dogecoin integration in X Money.
• Whether Shibarium’s locked value and developer activity recover.
• Volume in prediction markets and Hyperliquid, and whether the flows into those areas hold up.