Introduction
Memecoins are a pillar of cryptocurrency markets but often carry a negative stigma and remain controversial. Because most trend toward zero over time or are outright scams, skeptics dismiss them as worthless. And to be fair, most of them are. Like all trading, memecoin markets are ultimately zero-sum: one trader’s gains come at the expense of another. But unlike assets with underlying cash flows or utility, memecoins offer little beyond cultural value, making losses more common and often more severe. In our Galaxy Research report from 2024 we outlined these dynamics and argued that memecoins should not be dismissed outright. One year later, the sector has only grown more complex and significant.
While joke tokens have existed since the early days of crypto (Dogecoin debuted in 2013 and the long-since-forgotten Coinye West launched the following year), the modern memecoin era began with DOGE's pump in 2017. This was followed by the debuts of Shiba Inu, then BONK and dogwifhat on the Solana blockchain, and finally Pump.fun in early 2024. That launchpad gave rise to MOODENG, Pnut, TROLL, and millions of other memecoins.
Pump.fun changed everything. For the first time, the barrier to entry to launch a memecoin was essentially zero. With just a few dollars and no coding skills, anyone could create a token that is instantly tradable, liquid, and deployed on a bonding curve. This marked a structural shift for memecoins. Token creation spiked and launchpads became the new meta.
Pump.fun home page, the epitome of “degen”
Unlike altcoins, which typically claim some form of “utility” (governance rights, fee revenue, access to services), memecoins by definition have none. They literally do nothing other than function as cultural tokens, vessels for ideas, camaraderie, and collective identity.
Trading them is less about fundamentals and more about what can be described as “cultural arbitrage”: predicting or front-running attention cycles, e.g., buying the token for a viral TikTok trend before the market recognizes it is viral.
In the long run, the vast majority of market participants end up losing money trading memecoins, and in many respects, it’s just plain gambling. But dismissing the sector outright is lazy and ignores its significance.
The ecosystem faces challenges, especially on Solana, which dominates aggregate memecoin volumes. Snipers and “bundlers” capture large portions of supply within the first few moments of a token launch, creating future sell pressure. Median hold times for memecoins are measured in seconds as traders scalp new pairs for quick profits.
Yet, memecoins are here to stay. In an increasingly digital world, it makes sense that purely cultural assets exist. Critically, memecoins also act as onramps to crypto: they pull new retail participants into wallets and DEXs who wouldn’t otherwise use these products. For many people, memecoins are their first step into crypto-native infrastructure, opening the door for deeper engagement in DeFi.
Key Takeaways
Memecoins now make up ~30% of Solana DEX trading volume, down from 60% in January
Out of ~12.8 million Pump.fun tokens, just 12 tokens (0.00009%) account for >55% of the platform’s aggregated fully diluted market cap (FDMC)
Pump.fun tokens collectively represent more than $4.8 billion in FDMC
This is over 85% of total FDMC of Solana launchpad tokens. No other platform comes close.
Since launch, Pump.fun has captured the vast majority of Solana launchpad market share. It has been overtaken by another launchpad only twice, and only briefly each time.
The more recent rival to temporarily pull ahead of Pump was Bonk.fun this summer.
The median token hold time on Solana is ~100 seconds, down from ~300 seconds.
Such mercenary behavior highlights the increasingly scalpy, PvP nature of trading.
There are now more than 32 million tokens on Solana, up from less than 8 million before Pump.fun’s January 2024 launch.
This is a 300%+ increase in under two years.
Memecoins are a powerful entry point into crypto, pulling new users into wallets and DEXs.
The ecosystem exhibits a power-law distribution, in which a handful of tokens capture the majority of value.
Market Sizing and Activity
Since the start of 2024, the memecoin market has expanded at a staggering pace. On Solana alone, more than 32 million different tokens have been created. This scale would have been unimaginable prior to Pump.fun’s launch. A simple UX change of removing the technical expertise required to launch a token has fundamentally reshaped the ecosystem. Previously, launching a token required manually managing liquidity pools and committing significant capital. Today, anyone with an internet connection can deploy a tradable token instantly at negligible cost.
Solana’s high throughput and low fees made it a natural breeding ground for token creation, dwarfing other chains in sheer number of launches. However, BNB Smart Chain captures the majority of memecoin spot trading volume, powered by launchpads such as four.meme. Recently, AsterDEX’s explosive token generation event (TGE) has catalyzed broader interest in the BSC ecosystem.
The trend is consistent even when we widen the lens to include Ethereum, Coinbase’s Base, and BSC. More than 57 million tokens have been created across these chains combined, with Solana dominating (56%). Ethereum is home to more legacy/cult-like memes such as PEPE, MOG, and SPX6900. Base continues to grow, especially with Zora and other SocialFi-esque memes. In short, Solana is the go-to for the hottest memes and cultural trends, Ethereum is home to more established memes, and Base has done a better job of capturing niche launchpad markets, particularly in the AI (Virtuals) and social (Zora) verticals.
Notably, the Base team recently announced it is building a bridge from its Ethereum L2 to Solana, which would allow liquidity to flow between the chains.
Now let’s analyze the different memecoin launchpads. Pump.fun has reasserted complete dominance over the Solana token launch market, after briefly losing share to Bonk.fun over the summer. The launchpad space is hyper-competitive, with shiny new entrants constantly trying to differentiate through incentive tweaks or branding. However, these battles tend to be short-lived.
At times, new entrants have managed to briefly capture attention by introducing niche innovations. HeavenDEX, for example, experimented with novel tokenomics that quickly attracted liquidity and users, only to see its market share evaporate just as fast. This is a constant trend in crypto. Traders rotate rapidly into the next “runner,” and everyone competes to be the fastest mover.
Despite Solana traders’ TikTok-length attention spans, Pump.fun’s entrenched position has proven resilient. For now, token launchpads appear to be a winner-takes-most market.
Out of roughly 32 million total Solana tokens, ~12.9 million originated on Pump.fun alone. The platform has simply industrialized token creation on Solana. No other platform comes close, and its share of launches is larger than the combined footprint of all competing launchpads.
Readers may remember celebrity launches like Kanye West’s $YZY or Donald Trump’s $TRUMP. The launch teams didn’t use typical launchpads for their hyped-up tokens. Instead, they worked directly with Meteora, a Solana-based DeFi protocol that serves as a dynamic liquidity infrastructure. It allowed them to manually configure liquidity pools and manage token distribution. This gave teams more control and reduced the risk of bots or snipers grabbing tons of tokens early for “cheap.”
Value follows a similar distribution. The aggregated fully diluted market cap (FDMC) of Pump.fun tokens now exceeds $4.8 billion, orders of magnitude larger than its closest competitors. In the chart below, Pump.fun aggregated FDMC is shown in black while bonk.fun FDMC is in blue. The former peaked in January at above $10 billion.
The size of this market reveals two things. First, memecoins have reached a scale that makes them impossible to ignore: Tens of millions of tokens and billions of dollars in value. Second, the sector is defined by concentration. Solana dominates other chains; Pump.fun dominates Solana; and among Pump.fun tokens, a vanishingly small fraction of tokens accounts for the majority of value.
While Solana DEX volumes have been impressive this cycle, it’s interesting to look at the percent that comes from memes specifically. Data from Blockworks shows that meme volume has been decreasing as a percentage of total DEX volumes over the past year, with a sharp peak when President Trump launched $TRUMP.
Looking at the 100% stacked area chart below, memecoins regularly accounted for >50% of all Solana DEX trading volume in Q4 2024 but have since declined to just 20% to 30%. This means that SOL/USDC, stablecoin swaps, and other DEX swaps have started to outpace memecoin activity. While Pump.Fun has made launching a memecoin accessible to all, it has also accelerated the maturation, so to speak, of the meme market. Endless launches lead to fragmented and competing liquidity, making it more difficult for individual tokens to enjoy the same parabolic price appreciation as the top-performing memes in late 2023 to early 2024. This, coupled with the introduction of competing onchain trading applications, specifically Hyperliquid's perpetual futures product, have helped drive a reduction in overall volumes.
Onchain Dynamics
Market sizing shows us how big the memecoin system has become. The onchain activity of users is useful to see how these assets behave. What stands out most is just how short-term, scalpy, and power-law-driven the trading is.
The first indicator is holding periods. The median hold time for Solana memecoins (for wallets that bought and fully sold within seven days) has collapsed to around 100 seconds, down from nearly 300 seconds a year ago. This means that the average participant isn’t “holding” a token for hours, let alone days. Instead, they’re rotating rapidly, scalping a few percent profit against other traders in what is essentially a PvP trading game.
The Solana “trenches," visualized
The underlying infrastructure reinforces this pattern of behavior. Axiom is a platform that offers a feature called instant trade, which allows traders to get orders filled instantly with the click of one button. It’s easy to get filled on one-second candles, which results in a hyper-scalpy environment. Especially when you consider human nature, with most market participants more likely to sell in a panic at the bottom than to take profits after a pump, the expected value of the game is deeply negative for most everyone (except token deployers, insiders, and “KOLs” – more on them later).
The next chart is a snapshot of median hold times over the past year, segmented by number of trades per day. Addresses with fewer than one trade per day show hold times above 200 seconds. As trade counts rise, median hold times compress sharply to the 80-120 second range. Only for the most active wallets (>50 trades) do hold times lengthen slightly.
Overall, addresses across the spectrum are holding tokens for mere seconds.
The power-law distribution of value among Pump.fun tokens is astonishing. Out of nearly 12.9 million tokens launched on the platform, just 12 account for more than half of all fully diluted market cap (FDMC). Those dozen tokens collectively represent $2.69 billion, or 56% of the total $4.8 billion FDMC, while the other 44% is split among the remaining millions of tokens.
Put differently, 0.00009% of Pump.fun tokens control the majority of value.
The ecosystem is structured almost like a lottery. Almost every new launch is destined to collapse within hours, while a tiny handful manage to capture attention long enough to break out. For the vast majority of traders, memecoins are structurally a negative EV game, but the existence of these outliers continues to fuel speculation and “gambling in the casino.”
While most memecoin traders lose money, the infrastructure owners capture significant value. The chart below compares revenues from Pump.fun (launchpad), Axiom (trading platform), and Hyperliquid (an exchange for perpetual futures, not memecoins, but included for comparison). Notably, Axiom is run by a tiny team (less than ten individuals) and has scaled to millions in monthly revenues by collecting fees from memecoin traders.
Value accrues not to the tokens themselves but to the platforms and tools that enable their creation and trading.
The memecoin ecosystem can be best understood as a layered “stack.” Each layer builds on the one below it.
Underlying Blockchain
Most memecoin activity is concentrated on Solana, where low fees, high throughput, and cultural fit for hyper-gambling have made it the dominant chain for PvP trading.
Base and BSC also host significant activity, while Ethereum hosts bigger tokens and a less cutthroat culture.
Launchpads
Pump.fun collapsed the barrier to entry, allowing anyone to easily create a tradable token. Its bonding curve model guarantees liquidity at launch.
Competitors such as Bonk.fun, Believe, and HeavenDEX have appeared, but none has sustained serious market share. The data shows launchpads are a winner-takes-most market.
DEX Aggregators / AMMs
Once launched, tokens trade on automated market makers. Pump.fun operates PumpSwap, its own in-house AMM, to retain liquidity, while broader price discovery occurs through Jupiter, Raydium, Orca, etc.
This layer ensures tokens are immediately tradable by anyone, anywhere, 24/7.
Trading Bots and Automation
Execution speed dominates memecoin trading. Bots such as Axiom, BONKbot, and Trojan help users snipe newly launched tokens (buy them the moment they become tradable) and trade instantly.
This infrastructure has contributed to the reduction of median hold times and transformed the market into a hyper-PvP environment where it’s nearly impossible for a new trader to profit meaningfully.
Communities
X (formerly Twitter) communities and Telegram groups amplify memes and coordinate shilling campaigns. Communities are incentivized to push their token higher, with collective belief substituting for fundamentals.
This layer differentiates PvP “lottery ticket” tokens from PvE-style memecoins that can evolve into enduring cults or cultural movements (SPX6900, MOG, TROLL, FARTCOIN, etc.)
KOLs are a huge part of this layer...
Because KOLs (key opinion leaders) play an outsize role in amplifying or killing memecoins, I’ve assembled a non-exhaustive list of the most influential and active accounts driving narratives on Twitter:
*Note: CT stands for crypto Twitter
'Creator Capital Markets'
One of the recent metas/narratives in memecoins is the rise of what can be thought of as creator capital markets. Pump.fun’s newest initiative, Project Ascend, launched in September, treats tokens as direct monetization channels for content creators. The system replaces the flat creator fee usually paid to a token’s developers with a dynamic sliding-scale model tied to token market cap. Smaller-cap tokens pay a higher percentage of trading fees to creators, giving new projects additional resources to spend on growth, while larger-cap assets give less. For example, a sub-$300k token pays significantly more in fees to creators than a $20 million token.
At the same time, a new phenomenon of Pump.fun streamers has emerged. These are content creators who tie token launches directly to their live streams on the platform, creating an interactive experience around trading. This introduces three clear benefits:
Early stream participation is rewarded. Viewers who are “first” into a promising stream token can see immediate upside when the streamer catches traction.
Viral incentives are built in. Holders are directly incentivized to share the stream and bring in new attention, because price performance is tied to broader awareness. Sometimes they go to extreme lengths.
Creator economics change. Streamers can earn far more from trading fees on their token than from legacy platforms like Twitch or Kick, making tokenized streams a powerful alternative to traditional ad- or subscription-based monetization.
Whether this model proves durable is yet to be known. Tying streams to token speculation could quickly go awry as traders care only about the token and not about the stream. In the near term, though, the alignment of incentives between creators and traders makes Pump.fun look like the native financial platform for the attention economy.
Risks
Memecoins carry a unique set of risks that differentiate them from other assets in crypto. Ultimately, these risks reinforce why most market participants tend to stay away from memecoins.
Many tokens launched outside of standardized launchpads suffer from basic smart contract risks. The most common is the honeypot: a token which can be bought but not sold. On price charts, honeypots appear as a series of cascading green candles, giving the average trader the illusion of explosive gains, until they realize they cannot exit their position. Once the developer has extracted enough value, the price collapses.
Example of a honeypot rug chart. New buyers can push the price up but cannot sell.
Another constant danger is the rug pull. Even seemingly reputable tokens usually collapse once initial hype fades. Developers and insiders often hold large portions of supply (oftentimes on hidden “side wallets”) and can dump into retail liquidity. Similarly, on tokens with manually controlled liquidity pools, providers can withdraw liquidity suddenly. This means that even a small sell can kill the chart. Traders sometimes discover this too late, when a pair gets its liquidity pulled and shows only a few dollars or less of actual liquidity.
What a pair looks like on Dexscreener when the liquidity has been pulled. Effectively untradable. Note: this token has no affiliation with Tesla.
Memecoins are also vulnerable to “vamping” which is short for vampire attacks. This occurs when a copycat token overtakes the original by capturing more attention, often with the help of insider cabals or paid KOL shills. For instance, a coin like “67” could launch successfully on Bonk.fun, only to be surpassed later by a near-identical version on Pump.fun with a stronger backing. Even if a good trader is early and correctly predicts a trend, they may buy the wrong “version” of the token.
Finally, regulatory risk looms. While U.S. regulators have largely ignored memecoins recently (except to say they are not securities), their thin line between “harmless gambling” and “retail exploitation” makes them an easy political target. A crackdown could sharply curtail volumes. A good example of this is the $LIBRA token, which Argentine president Javier Milei promoted on social media, and which collapsed shortly after launch. Traders lost millions and insiders including Hayden Davis netted millions. Cases like this fuel narratives about exploitation.
Outlook
Memecoins are not just a passing fad. They are a durable fixture of crypto’s attention economy. Their significance is more in the cultural x financial infrastructure they have created.
As the influencer known as Murad has noted, the ecosystem resembles a pyramid of attention and permanence. At the base sit millions of disposable tokens. These are PvP gambling chips with lifespans measured in minutes or hours, dominated by bots and scalpers. In the middle are dozens of “cults,” tokens like TROLL and MOODENG that sustain sticky communities and can survive months or years. At the top are the rare few that transcend trading to become cultural movements or “near-religions.” These tokens achieve multicycle persistence and include DOGE, PEPE, SPX6900, maybe MOG, etc.
Each cycle delivers a few crossover listings that pull in normie flows and legitimize the sector. Those episodes reset the meme stack: imitators flood in, fees spike, and a new power-law winner emerges. Celebrity and political tokens (YZY and TRUMP) will remain periodic with high variance and huge media carry.
Day-to-day memecoin trading stays negative-EV for most participants. The edge sits with distribution owners. Owning the casino is better than becoming addicted to gambling in it. Axiom, for example, has broken $200 million in cumulative revenue with a team of less than 10 individuals. For institutions, the cleaner exposures are the infra and the few cult assets with multi-cycle persistence rather than the long tail of new launches.
But memecoins also play a broader role in the evolution of digital asset markets. Many users’ first interaction with a blockchain is buying a memecoin on a DEX. From there, they graduate into bridging assets, swapping stablecoins, or even experimenting with lending protocols. Memecoins lower the “mental friction” of crypto by making speculation feel social and approachable.
Also, memecoins serve as a stress test for blockchain infrastructure. Few use cases stress a blockchain as violently as memecoin mania. During the $TRUMP token launch, for example, the trading platform Jupiter recorded more than 42 million failed transactions in a single weekend.
The bottom line is that the memecoin sector is an infrastructure-backed flywheel for user acquisition and cultural speculation. Expect more noise, quicker rotations, and a steady emergence of a small set of platforms that compound.
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