Institutional Money Squeezes Memecoin Market Share

The launch of U.S. spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds in 2024 accelerated crypto’s institutionalization by giving asset managers and other regulated investors a familiar route into the market. That shift has favored bitcoin as a macro asset and drawn capital toward sectors with ties to traditional finance, including tokenized real-world assets. Memecoins, whose valuations rely heavily on online attention and speculative demand, have struggled to attract the same risk-managed, longer-term pools of money.

CoinDesk reported on July 24, citing TradingView data, that the combined market value of Dogecoin (DOGE) and shiba inu (SHIB) had fallen to $13.27 billion, the lowest since September 2023 and down 2.3% in July. Bitcoin rose 10% over the same period and reached a market capitalization of $1.30 trillion. DOGE and SHIB now equal just 1.02% of bitcoin’s value, a record low and sharply below the 7% ratio reached at the height of the 2021 memecoin boom.