Crypto

Labubu Coin and the Meme Coin Phenomenon: Understanding the Hype

Astron Team · 09/24/2026 · 4 min read

From time to time, a pop culture object turns into a crypto token almost overnight. That's what happened with collectible figures, internet memes, and, more recently, with toy brand characters that blew up on social media. The pattern repeats: a symbol already popular outside the financial market gets a blockchain version, attracts community and volume within weeks, and becomes a trading topic before any technical fundamentals are even discussed.

This type of asset is called a meme coin: a token with no product, no revenue, and, most of the time, no practical use beyond representing a cultural symbol. Its market value is born almost entirely from the attention it receives — and that's exactly why understanding the mechanism behind the hype matters more than trying to guess whether it will continue.

What characterizes a meme coin

Unlike a token with a defined use (paying a network's fees, granting access to a service, representing a stake in a project), a meme coin is usually created within days on an already existing blockchain, taking advantage of ready-made infrastructure to focus purely on distribution and marketing. What sustains the price isn't earnings or cash flow — it's the volume of mentions, the number of new buyers coming in, and the speed at which the community spreads on social media.

Why a collectible character turns into a token

When a brand or character already has an organized fan base — buying physical products, creating spontaneous content, forming a community around launches — that audience already trained to "chase" limited editions is exactly the audience most likely to buy a related token as soon as it appears. The logic is the same as a raffle or an exclusive sneaker drop: perceived scarcity and emotional identification with the symbol weigh more than any fundamental analysis.

The typical meme coin cycle

• Launch and first wave: low volume, price extremely sensitive to any large purchase.
• Going viral: social media mentions and listings on new exchanges accelerate buyer inflow, and the price rises fast — often hundreds of percent within days.
• Peak attention: the asset becomes a topic outside the crypto niche, attracting buyers who've never traded a token like this before.
• Distribution and drop: early buyers take profit, attention shifts to the next viral topic, and the price falls — in many cases, as fast as it rose.

This cycle can last weeks or just a few days. There's no fixed rule, and it's exactly this unpredictability that makes meme coins one of the riskiest assets within the crypto market itself, which is already considered highly volatile.

How to assess this type of asset without getting caught up in the euphoria

Before considering any trade with a meme coin, it's worth asking simple questions: how much of the trading volume is concentrated in a few addresses (which indicates manipulation risk)? How long has the token existed, and what phase of the hype cycle does it seem to be in? What would be the maximum acceptable loss if the price went to zero in a few hours — because that's a real possibility, not a hypothetical one, for this type of asset? Treating a meme coin as a small speculative position, sized before entry, is quite different from treating it as an investment.

The role of liquidity in this type of token

A detail that goes unnoticed in the euphoria is the real size of the market behind the displayed price. A token can rise 40% in a day trading a small volume, driven by just a few buy orders — which also means that, when it's time to sell, there may not be enough buyers on the other side at the price you expect. This gap between the "screen" price and the price you can actually execute on a larger position is called slippage, and it tends to be much higher on newly launched meme coins than on established cryptocurrencies like bitcoin or ether.

What this phenomenon comes down to

Meme coins aren't, in themselves, a scam — many trade legitimately on well-known exchanges and have real liquidity. The point of attention is different: their price reflects collective attention, not cash flow or economic fundamentals, and collective attention shifts direction without warning. Anyone trading this type of asset needs to accept, from the entry, that they're dealing with one of the market's most unpredictable formats, and size the position accordingly — never committing capital that would be missed if the invested amount disappeared entirely. Following the phenomenon with curiosity is different from treating it as a reliable income source, and that distinction is what separates conscious speculation from a blind bet.