Memecoins were never about memes, jokes, or financial nihilism; it is the underlying technology and its implications that are promising.
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Memecoins are not dead because the market is down and the narrative has faded, according to president of payment infrastructure company MoonPay, Keith A. Grossman, who said that memecoins will be back but in a different form.
The real innovation of memecoins is that attention can be tokenized easily and at low costs through blockchain technology, democratizing access to the attention economy, Grossman said. He continued:
“Before crypto, attention could only be monetized by platforms, brands and a small group of influencers. Everyone else generated value and gave it away for free. Likes, trends, inside jokes and communities created massive economic value.”
However, that value did not flow back to participants and mostly remained trapped by large, centralized platforms, he added.
Grossman compared the dismal memecoin outlook among analysts to forecasts of the demise of social media after the first generation of social platforms failed in the early 2000s, before the rise of a latter cohort of companies that turned the niche sector into a cultural phenomenon.
Memecoins were one of the best-performing crypto asset sectors in 2024 and were the top narrative that year among crypto investors, according to crypto market data platform CoinGecko.
However, sharp criticisms that memecoins and other social tokens have no value and several high-profile token implosions eventually caused the market to crater and investors to move on from the narrative.
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Presidential antics and the downfall of the memecoin sector
The memecoin market collapsed in Q1 2025 following several high-profile token collapses and significant drawdowns that were characterized as “rug pulls.”
United States President Donald Trump launched a memecoin ahead of the January 2025 inauguration, which reached a peak of $75 before collapsing by over 90% to about $5.42 at the time of this writing, according to CoinMarketCap.
Javier Milei, the president of Argentina, endorsed a social token called Libra in February, which also crashed, leaving 86% of LIBRA holders with realized losses of $1,000 or more.
The token had reached a market cap of $107 million before its collapse and was characterized as a rug pull by the crypto community.
Although Milei attempted to distance himself from the token launch, a government probe was launched into Milei’s involvement, which culminated in lawsuits from retail investors and calls for impeachment from Argentine lawmakers.
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