Meme coins are down bad. Dogecoin (DOGE) is down 60% from its 2024 high, Pepe (PEPE) has dropped 73% from its all-time high, and Dogwifhat (WIF) has plummeted 88% from its peak. Not only that but the trenches are drying up too.
Popular launchpad and cultural hub Pump.fun launched 64.6% less tokens on Wednesday than it did during its high achieved in January. Alongside this, according to Dune data, the weekly graduation rate of tokens is the lowest it's been since July 2024—a token graduates when it hits a certain market cap, previously this was $69,000 but was upped to $100,000 late last year.
This lull has prompted some traders to believe that the meme coin casino is closed, never to open again. Loopify, the pseudonymous founder of crypto education platform Pluid and trader, believes that the meme coin cycle is over, pointing to statistics that suggest that the meme coin trend has topped the last NFT bull run.
Specifically, the most popular NFT marketplace OpenSea has generated $943 million worth of revenue since its 2017 launch, according to Dune data, by comparison Pump.fun has generated over $574 million since its January 2024 launch. That’s not to mention revenue generated by trading bots, market makers, and other protocols essential to the meme coin economy.
Others see these statistics and simply think it's time to move on from Pump.fun as the center of the meme coin ecosystem.
“The Pump.fun days are over,” pseudonymous trader and WIF deployer Solana Bateman told Decrypt. “They extracted too much without ever giving back anything.” They added that, “the difference between us and them: we care about Solana, this is our home. They only care about filling their pockets.”
It’s a common accusation directed at the launchpad, with naysayers claiming that it isn’t doing enough to evolve the trenches and simply selling all of the SOL the platform generates—although the founders deny this claim. Bateman says that the platform could improve its tokenomics, create better liquidity pools, or offer more sustainable models by, for example, adding token unlocks at certain market caps.
Decrypt has reached out to Pump.fun founder Alon and will update this article should we receive a response.
How did we get here?
Much of the meme coin collapse can be traced back to the launch of Donald Trump’s official meme coin, days before his inauguration in January. Euphoria spread through the market as degens heralded a new era for meme coins and crypto as a whole.
The next day Melania Trump launched her own token, causing the TRUMP token to crash—with MELANIA soon following suit. With this, sentiment shifted at break neck pace as traders woke up to the “grift.” TRUMP is now down 85% from its all-time high, according to DEX Screener, and MELANIA has fallen 94%.
These two launches absorbed liquidity from meme coin traders while also creating significant losers, Rennick Palley, founder of hedge fund Stratos, told Decrypt. Over the coming months, more large meme coin launches spiked and fell within 24 hours—causing major losses for traders in the process.
Most notably, LIBRA soared to a $1.17 billion market cap before falling 96% to $40 million in just six hours, after Argentine President Javier Milei promoted it on social media. The fallout saw widespread allegations of insider trading involving major protocols and influencers, while investigators found connections between the meme coin’s issuers and those behind Melania Trump’s meme coin.
With a narrative building that meme coins were a rigged game, fears that the sector was rotten to the core reached an all-time high. Bateman believes this was the “last nail in the coffin” for meme coins.
“At first, [meme coins] look like a casino game,” Nick Vaiman, co-founder and CEO of analytics firm Bubblemaps, told Decrypt. "In reality, it’s far worse: the game is rigged from the start." He explained that, "Your chances are almost nothing because the real winners are already set: the insiders who know things ahead of time, the sophisticated snipers who get in early, and the team behind it.”
For some, this is enough to call it quits with meme coins and start looking at more stable investments with real value behind them. VanEck portfolio manager Pranav Kanade told Decrypt he expects capital to flow out of meme coins into a “handful of altcoins” due to the piece of mind they can offer. But not everyone is convinced.
“A lot of these people dislike the idea of traditional altcoins by VCs with big visions,” Loopify told Decrypt, “so it’s more likely that they will stick to singular cult tokens and/or [they] leave the market entirely until another opportunity arises.”
Crypto trader Murad Mahmudov has spoken about his meme coin investment thesis, which revolves around finding “cults” and buying into them. According to CoinGecko, however, not one token from his list has been in the green over the past seven days.
There are also macro pressures pushing prices down across the board. Bitcoin (BTC) is down 17% since the LIBRA launch and the S&P 500 is down 2.7% over the past month, according to TradingView, as the Trump administration rattles the market with tariffs.
“Global liquidity has also been declining as of late, and memes are the most sensitive to this,” Palley said, predicting that, “It seems that liquidity has recently bottomed, so memes are likely to recover over the next few months.”
Trench traders agree, with pseudonymous meme coin trader 0xWinged arguing that the market has “heavily overreacted,” and predicting that Solana will soon bounce back to $170 with volume returning to the trenches.
“At the end of the day, human nature is to want to gamble, and as liquidity increases in the market, so will cash available to gamble.” Palley said, adding that, “Meme coins are here to stay.”
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