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

Dog coins are worth far more than cat coins because Dogecoin launched in December 2013 and spent a decade becoming the name everyone knows. Cats owned internet culture first, but their coins arrived about ten years later.

Updated 16 October 2026: every market figure is re-read from CoinGecko and dated in the sentence, the leaderboard and table reflect the new top cat coins, launch months are now sourced, and common questions are answered at the end.

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. Nearly thirteen years later, as of 16 October 2026, CoinGecko puts dog-themed coins at about $17.4 billion and cat-themed coins at about $670 million. Cats have four-fifths as many tokens and less than 4% 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 a plain account of where $CATE sits inside it.

How big the gap is

Start with the numbers, because they are checkable and they are more lopsided than most people assume. Every figure in this section was read on 16 October 2026 and will have moved by the time you read it.

On that date, CoinGecko’s dog-themed category page said the category was worth $17.4 billion, and its cat-themed category page said $670 million. CoinGecko’s public data feed listed 655 coins in the dog category and 528 in the cat category.

So the two categories are comparable in population, at 528 against 655, or about 81%. They are not remotely comparable in value, at under 4%. There are nearly as many cat coins as dog coins, and on 16 October 2026 they were collectively worth about one twenty-sixth as much.

Per coin, that is an average of about $1.3 million on the cat side against about $26.6 million on the dog side. Averages flatter both, because each category is dominated by a handful of names. On the same CoinGecko data, the top five cat coins held just under half of their category, and on the dog side Dogecoin and Shiba Inu alone held about 91% of theirs.

Dogecoin by itself, at about $12.8 billion on CoinGecko that day, was worth 19 times the entire cat category. The largest cat coin was under 1% of Dogecoin. Between the two categories there were 1,183 animal-themed tokens listed, and two of them accounted 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. It is also one reason different sites show different numbers for the same thing.

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 made a series of posed cat cards, the Brighton Cats, 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 I Can Has Cheezburger, 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, posted as an animated GIF by Christopher Torres, with the YouTube version following three days later. It ranked fifth among the most viewed YouTube videos 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 nearly thirteen 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. The timeline below shows both gaps at once: cats led the internet by about seven years and trailed crypto by about ten.

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. Markus based it on existing coins, Litecoin among them, rather than building a blockchain from nothing. 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. (For what a meme coin actually is underneath the joke, see how meme coins work.)

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 from 2023 onward 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, meaning the one obvious choice everyone lands on without discussing it. The cat category’s fragmentation is visible in its own numbers: 528 listed coins and no clear leader.

What finally changed

The cat coins with any staying power are all recent. CoinMarketCap’s listing data puts Mog Coin’s launch in July 2023, Toshi’s listing in July 2023, Popcat’s launch 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. On CoinGecko on 16 October 2026, Popcat was at roughly $47 million and Cash Cat, the category leader, at roughly $115 million. Those are real sums by meme coin standards and rounding errors next to Dogecoin’s $12.8 billion that same day.

It is also worth being blunt about what those 528 coins mostly are. A category with 528 members and $670 million in it averages about $1.3 million per coin, and on 16 October 2026 the top five held just under 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 more concentrated still, with Dogecoin and Shiba Inu alone accounting for about 91% of its $17.4 billion on the same date. How fast most of that long tail stops trading is measured in how long meme coins last.

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 led the category on 16 October 2026, and CoinMarketCap dates its launch to June 2026, so the leader was under four months old. Toshi, second in August, had slipped to fifth by October. On the dog side you could have named the top two from memory, and they have been the top two for years.

That churn is the gap, more than the dollar figures are. A category where the leader is new to its own audience has not settled on anything, and an unsettled category cannot concentrate attention the way Dogecoin concentrated it. On 16 October 2026, behind Cash Cat, the cat side had six roughly comparable tokens between about $39 million and $60 million, which describes 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. The table below puts the CoinGecko figures for 16 October 2026 side by side.

Where $CATE actually sits

Now the part a community site might be tempted to leave out.

First, $CATE is not counted in that $670 million at all, because CoinGecko does not list it. On 16 October 2026 a lookup of its Solana contract on CoinGecko’s data feed returned “coin not found”, and a search for “catecoin” returned only the unrelated 2021 BNB Chain token. If you are unsure which token is which, the disambiguation guide sorts it out by contract address.

That omission cuts both ways. 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 $670 million, nobody can say precisely how much, and the same caveat applies to every “total cat coin market cap” figure you will ever read.

For scale, $CATE’s market cap was about $64 million at 14:36 UTC on 16 October 2026, according to the DexScreener reading on this site’s stats page, which updates hourly. Had CoinGecko counted it that day, it would have sat second in the cat category, behind Cash Cat. That says more about how small and unsettled the category is than about the token: something under three months old could reach the top three of a list whose own leader launched in June. Dogecoin was about 200 times its size.

The lineage idea around $CATE, that it 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 three 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. On 16 October 2026 CoinGecko listed 1,183 animal coins across the two categories. Two of them accounted for most of the money.

Live figures for $CATE, refreshed hourly, are on the stats page, and the structural checks worth running on it, or on any token, are in the five checks that actually matter.

Cat coins and dog coins: common questions