In 2024, memecoins reign supreme. But very few of them achieve any degree of “supremacy.”
Whether touted by social media influencers, created on Pump.fun, or rising in popularity through the sheer magic of memes, an ever-increasing majority of them fail.
As per a study from CoinWire, just 1% of influencers have managed to promote a memecoin to a 10x increase. Furthermore, just 3% of memecoins touted by influencers will ever achieve that 10x pump.
The study, which examined 1,500 tokens promoted across 377 American Twitter influencer accounts, found that 76% of these influencers promoted dead meme token projects, and 86% of those dropped by 90% within 3 months.
It’s a troubling statistic for a market currently “in bloom.” According to CoinMarketCap, meme tokens currently represent over $120 billion of the total crypto market cap.
Launched in Jan. 2024, Pump.fun has since dominated the memecoin market, for better or worse. According to Dune analytics, Pump.fun transactions account for over 50% of all transactions on Solana.
Similarly to the initial coin offering (ICO) craze that swarmed Ethereum in 2018 or the NFT bubble that emerged in 2021, meme tokens represent the best and worst of the crypto market.
Pump.fun, a Solana-based memecoin-creating platform, is the primary driver behind the explosive growth of memecoins. According to Dune , 3.8 million Pump.fun tokens have been created, with 48,945 launched in the last 24 hours alone.
Of these, just 614 tokens, or a dismal 0.016% of Pump.fun memecoins have “graduated,” meaning they never exceeded a $69,000 market value and could then be transferred to Solana-based decentralized exchange (DEX), Raydium.
Memecoin creators and investors do not care if the market is saturated. It’s about capitalizing on the moment, with very little consideration for the long-term.
Naturally, those meme tokens that do “graduate” or rake in the riches will continue to inspire others to create their own or at least invest in some.
A vast majority of memecoins were created this year, and this figure is expected to continue to rise.