Bitcoin meme coin Pups is up 1,056% for the week, days before the Bitcoin halving and the concurrent launch of the Runes protocol. Pups began the week at $22.50 before surging 44% on Tuesday. With a max supply of 7.7 million, Pups has passed $365 million in market capitalization.

While Pups (PUPS) is up over 1,000% and trading at $41.89, according to CoinGecko, the Ordinals inscription project that launched a year ago is up 119,813.7% since the beginning of the year.

Pups is the first memecoin on Bitcoin.

Pups is the first BRC-20 airdrop on Bitcoin.

Pups is migrating to Runes with a BRC20 and Ordinal pre-rune as mint/burn:BRC20 Pups - 77%Rune Puppets - 23%

Marketplace:https://t.co/vo2L6QRzcx

NFA, it’s just a json file on Bitcoin.

— Pups (@PupsToken) March 9, 2024

“Just bought the wif of Bitcoin bros,” viral crypto trader Ansem said on Twitter, referring to the Dogwifhat meme coin.

According to the Pups team, the token that started on BRC-20 will convert to the Runes protocol later this month when the Bitcoin halving occurs.

“Migrating to [Runes], which is far more decentralized than BRC-20, feels like the Bitcoin way,” a Pups spokesperson told Decrypt. “As the creator of Ordinals builds Runes and is under the protocol itself, it means that everyone indexing [Ordinals] is by default indexing runes tokens themselves.”

This puts a decentralized state for ordinals (NFTs) and tokens (Runes) under one roof, they continued.

Ansem’s tweets around Pups even got the attention of digital artist Beeple, who immortalized Ansem, Dogwifhat, and Pups in a digital painting.

“It's Ansem's world, and we're all just living in it,” Beeple wrote on Twitter.

it's ansem's world and we're all just living in it. ? pic.twitter.com/akQ7D35ehE

— beeple (@beeple) April 6, 2024

For its part, Dogwifhat (WIF) is $3.67, up 1.5% on Wednesday. However, the popular Solana meme coin is down 0.1% for the week, along with much of the Solana meme coin market.

Other dog-themed cryptocurrencies are also struggling this week. Ethereum-based meme coin Floki is  trading at $0.00019, down 1.2% for the week, while the Solana meme coin Bonk is priced at $0.00002, down 0.4% for the week.

The floor price of a Pups token inscription is currently $46 on UniSat. When asked about the sudden surge of interest in the Pups token, the spokesperson said it’s all about owning a good meme.

“Being the unofficial community token tied to the meme, there was nothing forced about it, and there’s no meme coin on Bitcoin that ever gained attention with memetics,” they said. “I think it came at the perfect time of innovation, meme coin supercycle. and Bitcoin being the largest chain.”

Pups is only one entry in a growing ledger of projects surging in popularity in advance of the joint Bitcoin and Runes milestones coming next week. Amid the hype, some in the community are pressing for a rational perspective on all the rising numbers.

real talk

runes hype went up an order of magnitude over the last two weeks

they've blown up and aren't even live yet

a lot of us who paid $200 for a puppet are now sitting on airdrops worth $7000 a piece

a lot of us who paid $5000 for an OPIUM are now sitting on airdrops…

— DeeZe (ref code “deeze”)? (@DeeZe) April 10, 2024

"Remember, none of this money is real until you sell,” cautioned pseudonymous crypto enthusiast and podcaster Deeze.

Edited by Ryan Ozawa.