Have you ever thought how many cryptocurrencies use animals as their mascots? Well, we at Cointelegraph just have.
Today, we present to you the top five altcoins with animals - incidentally, all mammalian - as mascots. Some of these coins are still in use, while others are either past their prime or already resting at the pet cemetery.
Dogecoin
One of the animals which are widely known to be faithful to humans is dogs. Almost every other person has a dog as their pet. That’s why we start with Dogecoin. Actually, the mascot of this coin is a very particular dog - it’s Doge, a meme dog which is based on a real Japanese Shiba Inu named Kabosu.
Doge - the dog, not the coin - became highly popular in 2013. By now it doesn’t really need to be described. But just in case you were living under a rock for the past four years: the meme is a picture of the Shiba Inu complemented with captions. Those captions are purposefully grammatically incorrect, and are supposed to reflect the doge’s thoughts - "so scare" and "such unsure,” for example.
By the end of the year, on December 8 to be precise, Dogecoin was launched as a “joke currency.”
The idea of creating this altcoin belongs to Billy Markus from Portland, Oregon. Joke currency or not, Dogecoin is still alive and well. In June its market cap reached $344 mln.
TrueFlip
TrueFlip’s symbolic animal is a dolphin wearing glasses and a top hat.
All over the world, dolphins are known as intelligent and highly social animals. Moreover, they have always been friendly to humans and have even saved the lives of some people.
Consequently, TrueFlip itself has a very user-friendly upcoming ICO. It is an international anonymous Blockchain lottery where you buy tickets and win prizes in cryptocurrencies.
Random hashes of Bitcoin blocks are used to openly draw the numbers for the lottery and the code used to run the game has been openly published on GitHub. TrueFlip’s goal is to become the most popular Blockchain lottery. If that happens, its jackpot could go as high as $8 mln worth of Bitcoin and even more.
Nyancoin
Back to Japan, we have another meme coin and this time the animal is the archenemy of dogs. It’s Nyancoin, based on the Nyan Cat meme.
The lively kitty called Nyan Cat was turned into a cryptocurrency in January 2014. The name is derived from “nyan” which is a Japanese word for a cat’s “meow.”
After a long slack, Nyancoins have made a comeback this April. The market cap is rising again and has already reached $394,000.
Pandacoin
Leaving Japan behind us, we are moving to its “big neighbor” - China. Here we find big fluffy pandas who became the mascot of Pandacoin.
On the coin, we can see a lazy panda bear which is depicted playing with a bamboo stick. Some cryptic hieroglyphs, which probably stand for “Panda Currency,” complete the look of this coin.
The developers claim Pandacoin to be ASIC-immune, unlike some other coins. Pandacoins were launched on Valentine's Day - February 14, 2014. Similarly to Nyancoin, this cryptocurrency used to have a quite low market cap and recently got back to $1.5 mln.
NeuCoin
Well, NeuCoin is quite new to the cryptocurrency world, but it has already joined the pet cemetery. This cryptocurrency was announced in February 2015, but nearly one year after, on November 25, 2016, it went belly up. NeuCoin’s mascot was a blue squirrel.
Being a rather quick and small animal, the squirrel must have had some responsibility for the successful ICO of a cryptocurrency focused on tipping and micropayments.
While it was still standing in the spotlight, NeuCoin integrated two games on Facebook: Solitaire Racer and SongQuest. But this currency is almost dead as its market cap has fallen to just $287 (yep, two hundred and eighty-seven dollars). Despite the project’s sudden demise, NeuCoin has managed to create a lot of fuss while it was still active, which is why it’s on this list.
Who’s next?
After this small research, we can easily say that altcoins with animal mascots are just on their way to popularity. But not all of them. Maybe that depends on the chosen animal? Or are other reasons more important?
Feel free to share your ideas with Cointelegraph in the commentaries.