Having any interaction with the crypto space, it's hard not to stumble over meme coins these days. They seem to be everywhere. Dogecoin, Safemoon, Shiba Inu, Banano, Hoge, ShiBonk, DogeBonk, and so on...you could spend a lifetime naming 1/10th of them.  A few of them, like Dogecoin for example, are native to their own blockchain (the Dogecoin code was initially copied from an earlier now-defunct cryptocurrency called Luckycoin, itself a fork of Litecoin). The vast majority though are ERC-20 or BEP-20 type tokens on layer 2 of another blockchain such as Ethereum or Binance Smartchain, respectively. 

I am not here to convince you to buy any of these coins or not. I am never going to give anyone advice on cryptocurrency again, as it tends to work out VERY poorly more often than not. What I will say is this: for the newer investor, these coins are extremely tricky. Most of them rely on getting in early and selling during the initial spike. If you are purchasing a meme token on a large exchange such as Coinbase or Uphold (Shiba Inu comes to mind as they have listed that recently) it is very likely that you are already too late to the party.  Not always, but usually.  If you really want to get in early on these coins, you need to be actively reading and part of whatever discord channels you can find, subreddits, etc - just consume as much information as you can and vet as much of it as you can. Also, you need to have a wallet like Metamask or another set up ahead of time with funds deposited to cover the gas fees so that you can acquire the tokens from sites like Uniswap or PancakeSwap before they take off and leave you in the dust.

Most importantly, really look into the tokenomics and the development teams of these tokens. You may find the one that takes you to the moon and beyond. Just know that many of them are not projects in good faith and can be "rug pulls", so DYOR!!!

As always, stay safe, be patient, and don't just HODL, stake it too!