Picture a lottery ticket you can trade 24/7 and hype with a single tweet, and you've captured the essence of the meme coin marketplace. When prices rip, it feels as if coins going to the moon is a matter of when, not if, and dreams of cashing out as an overnight millionaire flicker across lots of phone screens.
Yet the math behind those dreams is far less romantic than the memes pumping them, even for major meme coins like Dogecoin (DOGE -7.64%) and Shiba Inu (SHIB -6.13%), the two canine tokens that headline every bull market frenzy. Each has seen spectacular bursts of momentum, each has minted a handful of lucky early adopters, and each now faces the sobering reality of thin fundamental value. Can either still be a so‑called millionaire-maker from today's prices?
Few investors become millionaires with meme coins
To turn a $10,000 position into $1 million, you need a 100X gain.
At Dogecoin's recent price of about $0.22, you would need it to hit roughly $22.00. With 150 billion coins already in circulation, that would imply a fully diluted market cap larger than those of some of the biggest companies in the world. Dogecoin's current market cap is closer to $34 billion. Leaving Earth's gravity looks easier.
Shiba Inu investors face an even steeper climb. The token has a market cap near $8 billion. For a $10,000 entry to become $1 million, the token would need to rise to $0.0014, inflating the project's value to around $830 billion. Numbers that large demand genuine economic output, which is something meme coins simply do not generate.
Image source: Getty Images.
Neither project has any mechanism for funneling transaction fees or protocol cash flows back to holders. Nor do they have any ecosystem of their own.
Their "fundamentals" are narratives about their past or future virality, the importance of celebrity tweets, and the occasional overture toward developing some kind of technology for some kind of purpose, which never fully pans out. That does not mean sharp rallies are impossible with these two -- just that they are powered by sentiment, which is fickle.
When sentiment turns -- and it always eventually does -- liquidity vanishes fast. In other words, meme coins usually enrich early insiders, not late-arriving hopefuls.
Even Dogecoin's cult history shows how gains cluster early. Anyone buying after Elon Musk's Saturday Night Live cameo in May 2021 spent three years underwater before breaking even. Likewise, Shiba Inu's October 2021 spike to $0.000088 created a handful of paper millionaires who then watched nearly all of that value melt.
Without persistent real‑world demand, odds strongly favor serious losses rather than the minting of a new millionaire class.
...but one is still a better bet than the other
There are actually a couple of important differences between these two tokens, which matter for the (very slim) odds that they offer investors to become richer.
Dogecoin enjoys one big structural advantage, which is that institutions will soon be able to buy it. Bitwise updated its spot DOGE exchange-traded fund (ETF) filing in late June, adding the possibility of in‑kind redemptions that often precede Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) approval. Asset issuer Grayscale Investments went further, launching a single‑asset Dogecoin trust in January.
Institutional wrappers absorb floating supply, and they also let mainstream investors buy with a brokerage account instead of a crypto wallet. That flow advantage alone makes outsized Dogecoin moves much likelier than they are with Shiba Inu.
Scale matters, too. Dogecoin routinely clears more than $300 million in daily trading volume, giving large buyers room to operate without whipsawing price. Shiba Inu's liquidity is thinner and increasingly concentrated among small holders after whale activity collapsed more than 80% in late May. Fewer deep‑pocketed traders mean fewer shock absorbers when risk appetite dries up.
The verdict here is that neither coin is investment‑grade, and neither is likely to make anyone into a millionaire without a fresh season of bull market enthusiasm.
If you insist on owning one meme coin, Dogecoin has the clearer institutional pathway, and requires a (slightly) smaller leap of faith. Just be aware that your odds of losing money are much higher than your chances of becoming wealthy here.
