Bitcoin PUPS Up 81% Amid ‘First Memecoin’ on BTC Network Controversy

Rising Bitcoin meme coin Pups has soared nearly 81% in the last 24 hours, according to CoinGecko. Starting the day at $46.92 before climbing above $86.94, with a Twitter storm to fuel its fire.

Viral crypto trader Ansem has been a vocal supporter of the meme coin that has recently passed a $564,000 market cap. “Study pups,” he posted on Twitter. “Study the first meme coin on the world’s oldest blockchain.”

A lot of supporters of the token—as well as the official Pups website—have branded it as “the first meme coin” on Bitcoin. But there’s been some push back on this from people pointing to MEME, and other projects, as the first.

Ansem acknowledged these projects exist but rejected them as meme coins. “So first only matters when it’s funny to you,” a Twitter user responded.

Ansem did not hold back in his colorfully worded retort.

“Listen u cockmuncher I haven’t seen any other memecoins on BTC I’ve seen words and letters in black & gold text IRDC what you guys wanna call it,” he wrote in a reply.

This backlash led to the team distancing themselves from this narrative saying, “We are the first not first meme coin on Bitcoin.”

While Pups is currently a BRC-20 token, it will convert to a Rune later this month as the protocol becomes available at the same time as the halving.

“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 comes after the token skyrocketed 1,056% last week, in anticipation of the Bitcoin halving and the concurrent launch of the Runes protocol—a new Bitcoin token standard designed for shitcoins.

Edited by Stacy Elliott.