The First Meme Coin on the XRP Ledger Launched Seven Months Before Dogecoin
On 15 May 2013 someone issued 362,101 units of a token called MOO on the XRP Ledger, and fifty-six people opened a trustline to hold it. Dogecoin would not exist for another two hundred and five days. The first thing MOO ever traded against was not XRP, or a dollar — it was a token called SEX, issued six minutes later by someone else.
MOO, ledger 736,283
That combination is what separates MOO from everything before it. A joke name is easy; the 2013 ledger is full of three-letter codes somebody minted once and abandoned. MOO was issued, taken up by fifty-six separate accounts, quoted on an order book, and then kept — its last transaction is dated 27 June 2023, a decade after the first, and all 362,101 units are still outstanding across 38 open trustlines today.
It traded against SEX
The first order book MOO appeared in did not involve XRP. Six minutes after MOO’s first transaction, a different account issued a token called SEX — ledger 736,334, 14:21:20 UTC — and the two immediately started quoting each other:
It opens at parity — one MOO for one SEX — and within a day the rate moves to 100 SEX per MOO. Somebody was market-making a pair of joke tokens against each other in May 2013, on a ledger that was four months old.
What it is not, and why
Older non-currency codes exist. None of them survives the test of being a coin somebody actually launched rather than a code somebody typed once:
BEE is the tempting one. It is the oldest non-currency code on the ledger, dated 5 January 2013 — four days into recorded history. But its issuer is rD1jovjQeEpvaDwn…, one of the 136 founding accounts, publishing at justmoon.net — Stefan Thomas. The supply is 1. That is a developer checking that IOU issuance works, not a meme.
XXX is the harder call. It is twelve days older than MOO and reached further — 849 transactions, 85 trustliners, still active in 2026. But the same issuer also runs XTS, which is the XRP Ledger’s reserved test currency code, and XXL sits in the same cluster. Read together, that account looks like someone exercising the gateway feature with placeholder codes. We call it test infrastructure rather than a joke coin, and a reader who disagrees would move the date back to 3 May 2013 — still five months ahead of Dogecoin.
Where the modern shape shows up
MOO is a joke with holders. The recognisable meme-coin pattern — absurd supply, mint one, mint another, make a market — arrives eight months later, in a single account:
Ninety-nine quadrillion units of a token called FUN, five days later a second one called LOL, an order book for both, and it still holds lines in FUN, LOL, DNA and GKO today. If MOO is the first meme coin, this is the first meme coin operation — and it started five weeks after Dogecoin gave the genre a name.
Method, and the limit of it
Our records hold 83,980 tokens, of which 5,133 were created before 2021. Every one was scanned with its currency code hex-decoded, since anything longer than three characters is stored as 40 hex digits and reads as gibberish otherwise. Separately, every pre-2021 token with five or more holders was read by hand rather than filtered — that list is short enough to look at, and keyword filters are exactly how you miss the thing you are looking for.
Dates from our own records were then re-verified against the chain: the first appearance of each candidate currency in its issuer’s account_tx history on s1.ripple.com, with the ledger index and transaction hash recorded. Holder counts are distinct accounts that signed a TrustSet, not our cached totals.