rewrite this title What is Dogwifhat (WIF)? The Solana Dog Meme Coin With a Hat – Decrypt

What do you get when a cute dog puts on an even cuter hat? A meme coin, of course!

Meme coin investors love dogs, and a photo of a pooch sporting a pink woven hat went viral—and took the crypto world by storm, spawning its own Solana-based meme coin, Dogwifhat (WIF).

In true degen fashion, WIF is “literally just a dog wif a hat,” per its official site, with no promises of revolutionary technology or actual utility. Despite this, Dogwifhat rapidly rose to become one of the biggest meme coins by market cap after it first barked in November 2023, even as its value has fluctuated wildly over time.

What is WIF?

Dogwifhat (WIF) is a meme coin built on the Solana blockchain, with a community that often says “the hat stays on” as a sign of support. It gained popularity due to die-hard support from the crypto community, led by influencers such as Ansem—who amassed a sizable following while championing the token.

There really isn’t much more to it—no high-tech barkitecture here. Like they said, it’s literally just a dog wif a hat.

WIF’s rise and fall

WIF went live in November 2023, according to a tweet from its official account, before hitting its all-time high of $4.83 and a market cap of $4.58 billion on March 31.

Early Dogwifhat pioneers struggled through the first month of “HODLing” the token, only to see substantial gains in subsequent weeks.

In December 2023, the coin saw a 2,000x price swing in a course of a single month, and one trader turned $300 of WIF that they purchased the day the token launched into $300,000. While another investor claims to have made hundreds of thousands over the same period becoming a WIF millionaire.

“The dog is wearing a hat, and every time I looked at the meme it made me laugh,” the WIF millionaire tweeted. “That’s it.”

However, while it may have avoided burning out like the majority of meme coins, WIF has displayed significant volatility over the course of its existence.

In November 2024, it almost reclaimed it all-time high, touching $4.19 and a market cap of $4.2 billion. By March 2025, however, the token had plummeted to nearly $0.43—a drop of 91% from its all-time high.

Who is the dog wif the hat?

Named Achi (previously known as Chi-Chi), the dog in question is a Shiba Inu—a popular breed of dog within the crypto community, having become the face of the original meme coin, Dogecoin.

Achi is now about six years old, with the viral photo having being taken two months after she was born on September 15, 2018.

Achi currently lives in South Korea with her owners, who personally knitted the adorable hat themselves. Initially, her owners reacted positively to their dog’s newfound fame, taking to Instagram to announce an NFT auction of the original, iconic photo of Achi.

Unfortunately, this stirred up a bone of contention with the Solana community as the NFT was being minted on the Ethereum blockchain—rather than on Solana, the home of the meme coin. This came after Achi’s parents attempted to work with a Solana developer, launching an ACHI token, but the owners were shortly rug-pulled—it’s a dog-eat-dog world. After this ruff experience, the owners turned to an Ethereum-based online community to help out. Still, the Solana community wasn’t happy and complaints kept flying.

“Please don’t insult [Achi] and us,” the owners wrote in a pinned comment on the Instagram post, attempting to muzzle the haters. “You have no reason to blame us. Please cheer for us.”

On March 18, the iconic photo of Achi sold for 1,210.759 ETH (around $4.27 million at the time).

If you’re wanting more pictures of Achi, just head over to her owner’s Instagram account, which has documented her life over the past six years.

Who created the Dogwifhat meme?

While we know the dog wif the hat is Achi, the meme originated from professional Fortnite player and streamer Issa, who set the picture as his Twitter profile picture in 2019—to which a user replied, “Dogwifhat.”

More people in the Fortnite scene started changing their profile pictures to the iconic dog picture, with Issa tweeting “dogwifhat taking over.” Soon players, streamers, and organizations from other esports games like Rocket League got involved.

In the meme’s next evolution, people began adding the dog’s hat to esports organizations, hypebeast brands, and other memes. This was when YouTuber Keemstar got involved, setting his Twitter profile picture to the dog wearing a hat with his logo on.

Claiming to be the creator of the dogwifhat meme, Issa sold a figurine of Achi through YouTooz. Despite this, Issa claims to have no affiliation with the Solana meme coin, nor does he have “bad blood” with the project.

In response, Issa has launched a dogwifhat token on Ethereum—with significantly less success. Meanwhile, the creators of the Solana WIF token remain completely anonymous, with no information about him, her, or them online.

Dog wif Sphere?

In February 2024, the “Sphere Wif Hat” campaign launched to raise $650,000 to get its furry, beanie-topped namesake plastered on the largest screen in the world: the Sphere in Las Vegas. By mid-March, that goal had been reached—but as of March 2025, the dog (and its hat) have yet to grace the structure.

Throughout 2024, fans of the project raised concerns that the five organizers of the fundraiser (including pseudonymous WIF bull Ansem) had gone silent about the plans. By June, one of the organizers, Mihiri, promised that if the campaign was cancelled the funds would be returned.

These funds are held in a multi-sig wallet, which requires multiple wallets to sign a transaction in order for it to be processed. At the time of writing, it currently holds nearly $698,000 in the USDC stablecoin, along with $842 worth of Solana (SOL), and a litter of meme coins.

On January 29, Dogwifhat’s official account tweeted “Officially confirmed. Viva hat vegas” alongside a photo of its furry mascot wearing the Sphere as a hat and holding a phone with “Q1 2025” showing on its screen—leading many to believe that the long-promised deal was imminent. But the tweet was quickly deleted and reposted without the “officially confirmed” tag line, while the Dogwifhat account replied, “Dates as soon as we are allowed to share,” a Dogwifhat reply said. “Hat stays on.”

Two days later, a Sphere representative told Decrypt that there is no deal to advertise Dogwifhat on its venue—and that there never was one.

“We have never had a deal with Dogwifhat, and our agency at the time only had one very preliminary conversation early last year,” a spokesperson for the venue said. “There was and is no plan for Dogwifhat to appear on the Exosphere, and we are distressed they are using our name for fraudulent purposes.”

In response, the meme coin’s official account tweeted that it was in “ongoing negotiations with various parties to collaborate on the Sphere ad placement” adding that “since the Wif team is not a corporate entity, the organizers are collaborating WITH an established brand to execute this advertisement.”

However, the Sphere representative then clarified to Decrypt that “there was and is no plan” for Dogwifhat to appear on the venue, adding, “At this time, Sphere only accepts advertising from exchanges and [about] Bitcoin.”

While the fundraiser’s organizers maintain that the Dogwifhat Sphere advert is on its way, users of on-chain prediction market MYRIAD (launched by Decrypt’s parent company DASTAN) remain unconvinced, with nearly 96% believing it won’t happen by the end of Q1.