BITCOIN

In 2010, Pippin Barr posted a photo of a bootleg backpack printed with "Harry Potter", "OBAMA", a knockoff Sonic wearing the number 10, and roses. In 2023 someone turned it into a token, added "Inu", and gave it the ticker BITCOIN.

The joke makes fun of everything memecoins do: mashup names, dog suffixes, borrowed tickers. The team says it launched with no team tokens or presale, and within three months it was the seventh-largest memecoin on CoinGecko.

Most coins from that era were abandoned after the 2024 top. This community never left: holders who call themselves Sprotos still post it daily, some counting the days.

This month the original team launched Sonic Digital Labs and Hatchery, a launchpad where every new token is paired against $BITCOIN and creators earn 0.5% of trades paid in it. It is early and volume is small, but it gives the joke a job: to trade a Hatchery coin, you need BITCOIN first.

The joke has outlasted most of the coins it mocked, and now it has a way to grow with every new launch.