If you've been in the memecoin trenches for a while, you should have already taken a position and know which memecoins will be hyped this month. The pattern of new memecoins that pump is almost identical to all of them. Hyper-popular memecoins usually have a story behind their icon, for example, the Nietzschean Penguin. The Origin of the Meme: Werner Herzog's Nihilist Penguin It all started with Werner Herzog's documentary, *Encounters at the End of the World* (2007). In one scene, a lone penguin suddenly turns away from its colony (and the ocean where it usually feeds) and walks toward the distant interior mountains of Antarctica (about 70 km). There, only ice and death await. Trigger for the Price Explosion: White House + Elon Musk It started out relatively smoothly, but on January 23, 2026, the official White House Twitter account posted an AI-generated image of President Donald Trump walking hand-in-hand with a penguin toward a snowy mountain, with the caption "Embrace the Penguin." The post went viral, but it didn't mention any tokens.