It’s been a tough past few days for the crypto market, especially for Ethereum-based coins. From their recent highs, most decentralized finance coins based on Ethereum have crashed by 30-50%, plunging as capital has rushed to the sidelines.

The best example of the correction is Yearn.finance (YFI), a cryptocurrency that is core to the DeFi ecosystem. Since peaking at $44,000 just weeks ago, the coin has corrected by nearly 50% to $24,000 as of this article’s writing.

Not all coins are suffering from recent price weakness, though.

In fact, there’s an altcoin literally called MEME that is up around 1,500% in the past week, “defing’ the odds.

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Ethereum-Based Coin Surges 1,500% in a Week Despite Crypto Correction

The Ethereum-based MEME cryptocurrency has gained around 1,500% in the past week, rallying from approximately $120 to $1,900 as of this article’s writing. That is a gain of 1,483% in the span of seven days, making it likely one of the best-performing crypto-assets in the multi-million-dollar market cap range.

MEME is the native asset of MEME, a platform where users can transact and buy so-called “non-fungible tokens” (NFTs). NFTs have many use cases but in the case of MEME, users can buy and transact rare trading cards that contain unique art, often of popular DeFi trends.

MEME is required to create Pineapples, which in turn can be spent to buy these rare NFTs.

The reason why MEME has appreciated so heavily in the past week is that NFTs have caught fire. Not only are MEME’s trading cards worth a lot, NFTs on other platforms have regularly been selling for dozens or even hundreds of Ethereum.

Chart of MEME's price action over the past week or so. Chart from Chartex and TradingView.com
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MEME’s Weird Origins

Now that it’s been outlined what the project does, it’s worth taking some time to look at the odd origins of the project.

MEME was created by accident — really.

ConsenSys’s Jordan Lyall posted the tweet below in August, which contained an image of a theoretical platform where users could rapidly spinup forks of the top DeFi projects with just a few clicks.

This was a joke, which Lyall made clear later. But some users liked the idea and thus created a Telegram channel for the concept.

After some internal debates after a few dozen members joined, an Ethereum token was created called MEME, then distributed to the users of that Telegram channel.

In that group were builders and artists that decided to abandon Lyall’s original concept in exchange for digitized memes.

What’s especially crazy about this story is that the airdrops for the few dozen in the Telegram channel are now worth over $500,000 each.

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Photo by Brooke Lark on Unsplash Price tags: ethusd, ethbtc Charts from TradingView.com DeFing the Crypto Drop, this Ethereum Coin Is Up 1,000% in a Week