In 2025, online “FOMO” groups are urging people to buy PEPE, SHIB and DOGE, claiming their prices will soar to $1. But the raw numbers show that hitting $1 is essentially impossible for these meme coins. Below are clear facts, figures, and easy examples that explain why.
Insane Supply vs. Realistic Market Size
PEPE (PEPE)
Circulating Supply: ~420 trillion tokens (420,000,000,000,000 PEPE).
Market Cap at $1: If PEPE reached $1, the market cap would be $420 trillion.For context, in early 2025 the entire global stock market was worth about $100 trillion, and the global GDP was roughly $100 trillion per year. A $420 trillion market cap for one token is over 4× the size of all global annual economic output.
Example: Imagine you printed 420 trillion $1 bills and stuffed them under your mattress. It simply doesn’t exist in the real world to “buy” that many PEPE tokens at $1 each.
SHIBA INU (SHIB)
Circulating Supply: ~589 trillion tokens (589,000,000,000,000 SHIB).
Market Cap at $1: That would be a $589 trillion valuation.Even if every single person alive today (about 8 billion people) contributed $1 million each, you’d still be short $581 trillion.
Example: If SHIB actually hit $1, the total value of SHIB alone would be almost 7× the entire United States federal budget. There simply aren’t enough dollars—or anything else—available to support a $589 trillion market cap.
DOGECOIN (DOGE)
Circulating Supply: ~141 billion tokens (141,000,000,000 DOGE).
Market Cap at $1: That would be $141 billion.While $141 billion might sound smaller than PEPE or SHIB, it’s still huge. In early 2025, only a handful of assets—like Bitcoin and Apple stock—had market caps above $1 trillion.
Example: If every person in the U.S. (around 330 million people) bought $427 of DOGE, you’d hit $141 billion. In practice, there aren’t enough willing buyers to sustain that price, especially since new DOGE is mined continuously (an additional ~5 billion DOGE are created each year).
Inflation & Ongoing Minting Work Against “$1 Dreams”
SHIB: Although some tokens were burned, most of the 589 trillion supply still exists. Even with burn programs, you’d have to remove nearly all tokens from circulation to shrink supply enough to make $1 realistic—an impossible feat.
PEPE: No burn mechanism is strong enough to remove hundreds of trillions of tokens. PEPE’s supply is effectively “uncapped” if new tokens keep being minted to reward liquidity providers or fund promotions.
DOGE: Unlike Bitcoin (which caps at 21 million coins), Dogecoin mints roughly 5 billion DOGE every year. That constant inflation means the supply keeps growing, making a $1 valuation an uphill battle.
Simple Analogy:
If your job paid you $1 per donut but your boss kept making 10 donuts for every 1 you bought, you’d never be able to earn enough to pay “a dollar for each donut.” Similarly, because PEPE, SHIB, and DOGE keep minting new tokens (sometimes faster than they’re burned), their “true” per-token value gets diluted.
Real-World Buying Power Isn’t Enough
Too Few Buyers with Too Much Money: Even if every major crypto fund—like Grayscale, Fidelity, or Ark—dumped billions into one of these tokens, they couldn’t absorb enough supply at $1. Liquidity dries up: the moment you try to buy huge amounts, the price leaps, making each subsequent token much more expensive.
Crashing the Market Before Reaching $1: If someone tried to buy billions worth of SHIB or PEPE all at once, they’d push the price up initially. But as the price rose, fewer sellers would exist at each level, so costs would explode. Eventually, one big panic-sell or a margin-liquidation event could reverse the entire move, crashing the token’s price long before $1 is anywhere close.
Example of Liquidity Constraints:
On a small decentralized exchange, you might see $100 million daily trading volume for PEPE. If you tried to buy $1 billion worth at once, you’d wipe out the “buy orders” at $0.00001, $0.00002, and so on—driving the price up to an absurd level in seconds, then triggering massive sell-offs from whales who only wanted a small gain. This mismatch of supply and buy orders breaks the illusion of a “$1 target.”
Market Cap Comparisons: Seeing the Impossibility
Global Money Supply (M2): Around $110 trillion (in 2025). If SHIB tried to be $1, you’d need more than 5× all U.S. dollars in circulation.
Total Crypto Market Cap: In mid-2025, the entire crypto space hovered around $2 trillion. A $589 trillion SHIB market cap is nearly 300× larger than all digital assets combined.
Enterprise Giants: Apple’s market cap is about $3 trillion. PEPE at $1 would be 140× Apple. You simply can’t have one tiny meme token exceed the value of every major company, bank, and currency on the planet.
Why FOMO Stories Are Misleading
Cherry-Picked Gains: Yes, these tokens have seen 50%–100% rallies in weeks. But those moves start from fractions of a penny—rising from $0.00000001 to $0.00000002 is only a tiny fraction of $1. Reporting “100% gain!” looks great in headlines but doesn’t move you closer to $1.
Short-Term Pumps vs. Real Value: Memecoins often pump around celebrity tweets or viral memes. But as soon as the hype ends—say, a tweet from Elon Musk or a TikTok challenge—buyers disappear, and prices collapse back to the mean (often down 80% or more).
Zero Utility, Huge Hurdles: None of PEPE, SHIB, or DOGE is widely used for payments, lending, or real services at scale. Without real-world use cases, there’s no “fundamental value” to support a $1 price tag. Even stablecoins (designed to stay at $1) must maintain dollar reserves—meme coins have no such backing.
Easy Analogy:
Think of a Pokémon card that some collectors desperately want—its price can flutter wildly for a week. But unless that card has a genuine, lasting collectors’ base and limited supply, it can’t become “worth $1,000 any time soon.” Memecoins, like that card, thrive on short-term hype rather than true scarcity or utility.
Bottom Line
PEPE at $1? Requires a $420 trillion market cap—bigger than the GDP of the entire world by several times.
SHIB at $1? Demands a $589 trillion valuation—essentially impossible given today’s global money supply.
DOGE at $1? Would be $141 billion. Even if that’s “smaller,” it still dwarfs most major cryptocurrencies and requires enormous buying power that doesn’t exist without crashing prices first.
Before you chase the next “$1 or 10×” tweet, remember: numbers don’t lie. A handful of enthusiastic tweets and TikTok videos can spark short squeezes, but they can’t magically manufacture $400 trillion out of thin air. If someone says PEPE, SHIB or DOGE will hit $1, ask them:
“Where are we getting the additional $500 trillion or so needed to make that happen?”
Once you see these absurd supply and market-cap gaps, the “FOMO trap” dissolves—and you can make smarter choices with your money.