Cats Won the Internet. Dogs Won Crypto. The Gap Is Ten Years Wide.

Cats owned the internet before crypto existed. Captioned cat photographs are older than the telephone, lolcats were a mainstream joke by early 2007, and Nyan Cat had won Meme of the Year before most people had heard of Bitcoin.

Then in December 2013 a dog joke became money, and the animal hierarchy of the internet failed to transfer. Twelve and a half years later, dog-themed coins are worth about $14.9 billion and cat-themed coins about $507 million. Cats have two-thirds as many tokens and a thirtieth of the value.

That gap is the most interesting fact in this corner of crypto, and it is almost never examined, because the pages that come up for this subject are price lists rather than explanations. So here is the actual chronology, sourced, along with the least flattering version of where $CATE sits inside it.

The size of the gap, right now

Start with today’s numbers, because they are checkable and they are more lopsided than most people assume.

As of 10 August 2026, CoinGecko’s dog-themed category holds 585 coins worth a combined $14.9 billion. Its cat-themed category holds 392 coins worth $507 million.

So the two categories are comparable in population, at 392 against 585, or 67%. They are not remotely comparable in value, at 3.4%. There are nearly as many cat coins as dog coins, and they are collectively worth about one thirtieth as much.

Per coin, that is an average of $1.3 million on the cat side against $25.5 million on the dog side. Averages flatter both, because each category is dominated by a handful of names: the top five cat coins hold about 61% of their category, and on the dog side Dogecoin and Shiba Inu alone hold about 91% of theirs.

Dogecoin by itself is worth 21 times the entire cat category. The largest cat coin is 1.3% of Dogecoin. Between the two categories there are 977 animal-themed tokens in existence, and two of them account for most of the money in either.

One caveat on the figures before leaning on them. These are curated categories, which means membership is an editorial decision by the tracker rather than a fact about the blockchain. A token only counts if somebody added it, which becomes relevant at the end of this post.

Cats got there first, by years

The cultural priority is not close, and it long predates the internet. Wikipedia’s history of the lolcat traces captioned cat photography to the British photographer Harry Pointer, who was posing cats with amusing text in his Brighton Cats series in the early 1870s. The format is roughly 150 years old.

The internet era follows the same pattern. The domain caturday.com was registered in April 2005, lolcats.com in June 2006, and the site that turned the genre into a mass phenomenon posted its first image on 11 January 2007. By then cat content was already the default currency of internet humour.

Nyan Cat arrived on 2 April 2011, uploaded as an animated GIF by Christopher Torres, with the YouTube version following three days later. It became the fifth most viewed YouTube video of 2011, won a Webby for Meme of the Year in 2012, and eventually peaked at over 210 million views.

So by the end of 2012, cats had a century and a half of captioned-photo tradition, a mainstream humour franchise, and one of the most watched videos on the internet. Dogs had a good meme that was still gathering pace.

If you had been asked in 2012 which animal would end up attached to billions of dollars of internet money, cats were the obvious answer and it would not have been close. That is what makes the next eighteen months worth examining rather than assuming.

Then a dog joke became money

The doge meme came from a single photograph that Atsuko Sato posted on her blog in 2010, of her Shiba Inu, Kabosu. Searches for it began climbing in July 2013 and Know Your Meme named it the top meme of that year. Kabosu died of leukaemia at eighteen on 24 May 2024, which is worth knowing given how many billions of dollars are named after her.

On 6 December 2013, software engineers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer launched Dogecoin. That is the moment the hierarchy diverged: not because dogs were funnier, but because two engineers happened to pick the meme that was peaking that quarter and happened to build something durable out of it.

The second entry took nearly seven years. Shiba Inu was created in August 2020 by an anonymous person or group using the name Ryoshi. Cats, in the meantime, had no equivalent at all.

The part that gets skipped is that being first was not what made Dogecoin matter. Plenty of 2013 and 2014 joke coins were first at something and are now unrecoverable. Dogecoin is the only meme coin of its generation still near the top of the market twelve and a half years later, and it got there by accumulating the one thing that cannot be minted: people who stayed. Tipping culture, a genuinely durable community, and eventually a 2021 retail wave that arrived to find the brand already universally legible.

That is the asset every later animal coin has been competing against. Not a Shiba Inu, and not a first-mover timestamp, but a decade of compounding familiarity that reached ordinary people through exchange listings and news coverage long before cat coins were technically possible to launch at scale.

Why cats lost the decade

There is no single reason, and the honest answer is a combination of accident and structure.

Timing was mostly luck. Dogecoin exists because the doge meme peaked in the same months that making a joke altcoin became technically trivial. Fork Litecoin, change the logo, ship. Had that window landed in 2011 instead, Nyan Cat was sitting right there.

First mover advantage compounds unusually hard here. A meme coin’s only asset is recognition, and recognition does not split evenly. Once Dogecoin became the shorthand for the entire concept, every subsequent animal coin was implicitly a Dogecoin derivative, including the dog ones. Being second in a category whose only product is being known is a structurally bad position.

The infrastructure was not there. Launching a token in 2014 meant forking a blockchain. The cat coins that matter all arrived after launchpads made issuing a token a two-minute operation, which is why they cluster in 2023 and 2024 rather than trickling out across a decade.

And cat culture is diffuse. Dogs in crypto have one canonical face. Cats have thousands, none dominant, which is delightful culturally and terrible for a Schelling point. The cat category’s fragmentation is visible in its own numbers: 392 coins and no clear leader.

What finally changed

The cat coins with any staying power are all recent. Mog Coin and Toshi arrived during 2023, Popcat in December 2023, and cat in a dogs world in March 2024. Trackers disagree by a day or two on some of these, so treat the months rather than the dates as the reliable part.

Two things happened at once. Launchpads removed the technical barrier, so a cat coin no longer required a developer, and Solana in particular made issuing and trading one nearly frictionless. At the same time the market got large enough to support more than one joke, which it had not been in 2014.

What did not happen is a cat coin displacing Dogecoin. Popcat at roughly $43M and Cash Cat at roughly $144M are real businesses by meme coin standards and rounding errors next to a $10.8 billion incumbent.

It is also worth being blunt about what those 392 coins mostly are. A category with 392 members and $507 million in it averages $1.3 million per coin, and the top five hold more than half the total. The rest is a long tail of tokens that exist, have a ticker, and are worth approximately nothing. That is not a cat problem. The dog category is worse concentrated, with Dogecoin and Shiba Inu alone accounting for about 91% of its $14.9 billion.

The gap that has not closed

Put the two categories side by side and the asymmetry survives every way you cut it: market cap, largest coin, second largest, concentration, and date of first serious entry.

The most important of those is the last one. A ten year head start in a market whose only asset is recognition is not a gap that closes because a newer coin is better designed. It closes, if it ever does, because attention moves, and attention does not take instructions.

Notice too that the largest cat coin is not any of the ones a crypto audience would name. Cash Cat leads the category and is not a household name even inside crypto, which tells you how little consensus exists on the cat side. On the dog side you could have named the top two from memory.

That difference in legibility is the gap, more than the dollar figures are. A category where the leader is unfamiliar to its own audience has not settled on anything, and an unsettled category cannot concentrate attention the way Dogecoin concentrated it. The cat side currently has five roughly comparable tokens between $40M and $144M, which is a description of a fight still in progress rather than a winner.

For the gap to close, one cat coin would have to become the shorthand, the way one dog coin did. Nothing in the current distribution suggests that has happened yet, and this site is not going to pretend it can predict which one it would be.

Where $CATE actually sits

Now the unflattering part, because a community site that skipped it would not be worth reading.

$CATE’s market cap was about $22.2 million on 10 August 2026. Against the cat category’s $507 million that is roughly 4%, which sounds respectable until you notice it does not crack the top five. It is a mid-sized token in the smaller of two animal categories, in a market whose leader is 490 times its size.

There is a further wrinkle that regular readers will have seen coming. $CATE is not counted in that $507 million at all, because CoinGecko does not list it. The category totals quoted throughout this post, including by every other site that cites them, systematically exclude the newest tokens. So the cat category is somewhat larger than $507 million, nobody can say precisely how much, and the same caveat applies to every “total cat coin market cap” figure you will ever read.

The lineage claim this site makes, that $CATE is the cat counterpart to Dogecoin, is a statement about culture and intent. It is not a prediction, and nothing in the numbers above supports treating it as one. What the numbers support is narrower and more interesting: cats were first everywhere except here, the reason is closer to accident than to merit, and the correction has only been underway for about two years.

So what does the history actually tell you

That the animal on the coin is not the variable. Dogs did not win crypto because people prefer dogs, and the internet’s century of cat supremacy bought cats nothing here. Dogecoin won because it was first, survived, and became the reference point, and everything after it has been competing against a decade of accumulated recognition rather than against a Shiba Inu.

Which also means the useful question about any animal coin is not which animal. It is whether anyone will still be paying attention in a year, because that is the only thing Dogecoin has that its thousands of imitators do not. Nine hundred and seventy-seven animal coins currently exist across the two categories. Two of them account for most of the money.

Live figures for this token, refreshed hourly from chain, are on the stats page. If you arrived here trying to work out which token called CATE you are actually looking at, that is a real problem with a real answer in the disambiguation guide, and the honest assessment of the structural checks is in the five checks that actually matter.