About The Lab

MemeDNA is a forensic meme research facility. We write Lab Reports — deep, sourced, exhaustive origin stories for the memes that shaped internet culture. We don't do "uploaded by anonymous user" and call it a day. We trace the actual genome: who made it, where it first appeared, how it mutated, when it peaked, and whether someone turned it into a cryptocurrency with a $200M market cap at 3am on a Tuesday.

Think of us as the crime lab for internet culture. Every meme gets a specimen ID, a classification, a status assessment, and a full forensic report. We catalogue mutations the way a geneticist catalogues alleles — because memes are genetic, they just run on social networks instead of nucleotides.

We also track the meme-to-coin pipeline, because in 2026, the distance between a viral image and a Solana token is approximately four hours and one anonymous Telegram group. Someone has to map that lifecycle. We volunteered.

Meme origins are disappearing. The original posts get deleted. The forums shut down. The Wayback Machine can't index a 4chan thread that lasted twelve minutes. And the "meme encyclopedias" that exist? They give you two paragraphs, an "origin" section with no dates, and a gallery of derivatives sorted by nothing in particular.

That's not documentation. That's a wiki someone abandoned in 2019.

MemeDNA exists because meme history matters more than people realize. The Doge meme created a cryptocurrency now worth billions. Pepe the Frog was co-opted by political movements, then reclaimed, then financialized across multiple blockchains. Wojak's mutation tree has more branches than most phylogenetic diagrams. These aren't just funny pictures — they're cultural artifacts with real consequences, and they deserve the same rigour you'd give any historical record.

"Every meme has an origin story. Most of them are being lost to link rot, deleted posts, and communities that no longer exist. We're racing against digital entropy, and frankly, we should have started sooner."

The gap isn't information — it's rigour. There's no shortage of meme content online. What's missing is the forensic approach: primary sources, verifiable timelines, proper attribution, and an honest assessment of what we don't know. When we can't verify an origin, we say so. When the real creator is disputed, we present the evidence and let you decide. We'd rather be incomplete and honest than comprehensive and wrong.

Every Lab Report follows the same forensic protocol. This isn't content marketing disguised as analysis — it's actual research, and we take it irritatingly seriously.

Sometime around 2021, memes stopped being just cultural objects and became financial instruments. Dogecoin proved that a meme could sustain a multi-billion dollar market cap. PEPE proved it could happen again, faster and with less infrastructure. And pump.fun proved that literally anyone could launch a meme coin in under a minute.

This changed the game for meme documentation. You can't write a comprehensive Pepe the Frog report without covering $PEPE. You can't analyse Doge without covering Dogecoin's evolution from joke to Elon Musk's favourite cryptocurrency. The meme and the coin are now part of the same organism — separate strands of the same DNA.

MemeDNA tracks both strands. Every meme Lab Report links to associated coins. Every Coin Report links back to its parent meme. We track contract addresses, chains, launch dates, and risk levels. We don't give financial advice, but we do give you the data to see when a "community token" launched twelve hours after the meme went viral and has a single wallet holding 40% of supply.

Got a tip on a meme origin? Found a primary source we missed? Want to report an error in a Lab Report? We actually want to hear from you. The best meme research happens when the community contributes evidence.

Corrections get priority. We'd rather fix a mistake in an hour than let it sit for a week. If you've got proof that contradicts something in one of our reports, send it over — screenshots, archive links, timestamps. The more evidence, the faster we move.