Meme coins have become the cornerstone of the crypto economy, despite some questioning their value. They have surged in the crypto market due to their virality and relevance. Memes are ideas, symbols, or behaviors passed within or between subcultures, a phenomenon that has existed for centuries. In the era of COVID-19, meme stocks skyrocketed, with investors gathering on websites to express dissatisfaction. The growth of meme coins is built on the currency links shared by holders of non-fungible tokens, indicating that communities, cultures, and trends may increasingly rely on monetary tools. The dissemination of memes evolves with technological advancements, with blockchain being the next stage of meme evolution.
Solana is a major blockchain for meme coins, adding 28,000 tokens daily. The types of meme coins have become more specific, ranging from dogs and animals to political beliefs and viewpoints. The explosion of meme coins may drive the development of new applications and adoption of blockchain. Bitcoin and meme coins will continue to drive the development of the crypto market, while niche markets like NFTs, DeFi, and gaming continue to grow. As blockchain becomes a popular means of cultural exchange, integrating memes into technology will make it a globally adopted new media.
Whether you like them or not, meme coins have become the cornerstone of the crypto economy. They are not known for their technological innovation or pushing the boundaries of blockchain expansion, with some skeptics claiming they should have no value at all. Some builders of the blockchain ecosystem even believe that memes overshadow their serious work, damaging the overall brand and image of cryptocurrencies. However, due to their virality and relevance, meme coins have surged in the broader crypto market and accumulated immense value.
Fundamentally, memes are ideas, symbols, or behaviors passed within or between subcultures. History shows that memes have existed in various forms and mediums in human civilization for centuries. They may continue to exist and be presented on the most widely used communication channels. In the era of COVID-19, meme stocks surged, with investors gathering on websites like r/wallstreetbets to express dissatisfaction with the situation, most notably GameStop. Permissionless blockchains have seen this phenomenon further expand. Dogecoin may have been the original meme coin, but meme coins have become popular in recent years. It is estimated that the total market value of meme coins on permissionless blockchains now exceeds $60 billion. The growth of meme coins is built on the currency links shared by holders of non-fungible token projects, indicating that communities, cultures, groups, and trends may increasingly rely on monetary tools for cohesion and speculation.
Throughout history, memes have found their way into the most advanced, influential, and widely adopted communication channels of their time. All of these have had a significant impact on humanity.
Adopting blockchain as the medium for expressing memes highlights the importance of this technology as a central platform for sharing thoughts and experiences in the pure digital age.
Meme coins are tokenized descriptions of internet memes or other humorous events or concepts. They are native to blockchain, transferable, usable in blockchain-based applications, and tradable on secondary markets like DEX. Typically expressed through their code or a string of characters identifying them, meme coins also have associated characters or other visual effects, much like memes known today. For example, Dogecoin, created in 2013, was the first-layer blockchain aimed at satirizing Bitcoin and relied on Shiba Inu photos that recently gained popularity online. Dogecoin is a branch of Bitcoin launched before the rise of tokenization, so Dogecoin needed its own first-layer blockchain to exist. Today, existing first-layer blockchains like Ethereum, Solana, and even Bitcoin have the ability to carry and issue non-native tokens, equipped with token contracts, decentralized exchanges, and other tools to facilitate token issuance.
Behind each meme coin is a contract tied to a first-layer blockchain or a second-layer network specifying the meme coin’s name, supply, and other details outlining its digital identity. Meme coins can only be deployed by launching one of these token contracts. In the early days of blockchain, issuing tokens was mostly expensive and difficult as it required technical abilities to write or adjust contracts, issue them on the blockchain, and create liquidity pools on DEX for trading. Today, many of these difficulties have been abstracted out, with services automatically launching tokens and creating liquidity pools after users input the details of their meme coins. Recently, Pump.Fun has become a popular platform for launching meme coins.As a professional translator, I will translate this news article into English in a descriptive manner, ensuring accuracy and coherence in the sentences, while retaining proper nouns and all 
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Introduction
The launch of meme coins is relatively easy, creating a flywheel effect that has led to unprecedented speculation and the emergence of meme coins on a massive scale.
Gambling as a Distribution Mechanism
By definition, with very few exceptions, meme coins have no real utility. While Dogecoin is used as gas tokens to purchase block space on the Dogecoin blockchain, today’s meme coins are almost entirely native gas tokens. Meme coins are usually blockchain tokens with no corresponding gas or application usage, often promoted by creators, held by communities, or speculated on by traders as bets on the potential viral spread of the meme itself. They lack potential utility, making meme coins highly unstable, and their volatility as a vector attracts users, leading to a broader adoption and understanding of both the meme coins and the blockchains hosting them. The hope for quick profits and overnight riches is a motivating factor for many people interested in meme coins. The possibility of increasing financial wealth acts as a catalyst, accelerating the adoption of memes on the blockchain as a canvas for cultural and emotional expression.
Some argue that this is a flaw, suggesting that meme coins are temporary or will fail as people make and lose money. However, as noted, memes have always existed, and the desire for quick profits has always been present. While memes have become ubiquitous in the internet age, they were not monetizable and tradable assets until recently. Tokenizing memes on the blockchain combines the powerful viral spread of information with human desire for wealth. This combination is new and may continue to remain popular.
Digital Memes
In this section of the report, we will examine the on-chain activities and values driven by meme coins over the past few years.
By 2024, Solana will become the primary blockchain for meme coins. Solana’s low-cost environment reduces barriers for users seeking to create and trade meme coins, while the fast transaction confirmation speed makes using the blockchain similar to loading memes on an internet browser. The end of 2023 marked a turning point for on-chain memes. From August to November 2023, Solana saw an average of about 9,000 new tokens per day, which has now increased to an average of 28,000 tokens per day, more than triple the previous rate. At its peak, using a 30-day moving average, it added 100,000 tokens per day (a total of 670,000). While not all of these tokens are meme coins, the large meme culture on Solana allows it to serve as a proxy for meme coin creation.
Launching Tokens on Solana Daily Chart
In the past 30 days, the highest market cap Solana meme coins have been exchanging on-chain between $91 million and $109 million on average. Bonk and WIF are the top two Solana meme coins by market cap, accounting for an average of 59% of the trading volume during this period.
Top Solana Meme Coins by On-chain Exchange Volume
With the growth in trading volume, the user base is also expanding. The top 10 meme coins on Solana have over 1.136 million unique holders. It’s important to note that this number considers any addresses holding multiple included meme coins as a single holder. This trend highlights the influence of meme coins and the rapid spread of this trend.
Unique Holders of Solana Meme Coins
However, meme coins did not start on Solana.
DOGE
is one of the earliest and most valuable cryptocurrencies, launched in 2013, with a value of $24 billion as of May 29, 2024. $DOGE is launched on its own blockchain – the Dogecoin network, and you can learn more about it in this Galaxy research report. Besides Dogecoin, Ethereum was the original platform for meme coins during the 2020-2022 crypto bull market cycle. Serving as the home for iconic memes like SHIB, and more recently PEPE and Harry Potter Obama Sonic 10 Inu, Ethereum played a crucial role in providing a foundation for memes to find a foothold on the blockchain. Even though Ethereum’s activities have shifted to other networks, it still hosts the second and third largest meme coins in SHIB and PEPE.
As the number of meme coins grows, so does their scale. As of May 29, 2024, the total value of the top meme ecosystems was $57 billion, a 3.5x increase from the same period last year and a 4.8x increase from the bear market low. An interesting feature of this chart is that four out of the seven meme coins in the chart were created in the last 511 days as of May 29, 2024; two of them were launched within 160 days. This highlights the rapid development nature of meme coins and their lack of longevity due to the rapid development of human culture and the internet today.
Market Value of Top Meme Coins
Over time, people are becoming more accustomed to using blockchain as a platform for cultural exchange, leading to more specific types of memes on-chain, ranging from major dog and animal coins to expressing political beliefs and viewpoints. This shift indicates that blockchain is becoming a more important means of communication, with memes being the primary vehicle. The chart below tracks the total market value of top “PolitiFi” tokens, which describe political figures and symbols in meme form.
Until 2024, before the 60th quadrennial U.S. presidential election, these types of memes were virtually non-existent on the blockchain. Meme coins representing political figures were essentially non-existent in the past, despite having the ability to launch them in several election cycles. However, some political figures like former U.S. President Donald Trump have tried NFTs in the past.
Market Value of Top PoltiFi Tokens
The Unapparent Utility of Meme Coins
While meme coins as assets generally do not offer specific utility – they are not used to purchase block space like first-layer native assets and have little to no governance or application utility – some have led to significant secondary activities. For example, the dog-themed meme coin $BONK was launched on Solana shortly after the collapse of FTX in late 2022. Due to its close association with Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX, the usage of the Solana blockchain dropped significantly. The value of Solana’s native token $SOL itself has dropped 86% from its all-time high in November 2021, and another 78% between the FTX collapse and early 2023. $BONK was initially created to reignite interest in Solana and catalyze on-chain activities by airdropping free meme coins to Solana developers, application users, and NFT holders. Apart from the significant price increase, $BONK has since integrated into the Solana ecosystem, integrated with over 129 DeFi, gaming, NFT, and other types of on-chain applications; become a major sponsor of Solana and non-Solana-related social/cultural events; and developed its own banking-specific applications, such as the bank AMM, ownership contracts, and a gamified fitness application, Moonwalk.
Meme coins can also serve as liquidity flowing through newly designed application pipelines. Decentralized exchanges and DeFi applications that serve meme coins today may become the infrastructure for future tokenized markets. Just as MakerDAO allows users to convert ETH into stablecoins, but is now one of the main ways for traditional asset issuers to bring U.S. Treasury bonds onto the blockchain, the meme coin explosion may also lead to the development and evolution of new application primitives, driving future, more sustainable blockchain adoption.
Conclusion
In 2024, two major submarkets have been driving much of the capital flow and interest in the crypto market: Bitcoin (especially considering the introduction of spot Bitcoin ETP in the U.S.) and meme coins. Other significant submarkets such as NFTs, DeFi, and gaming are still growing and developing, but their tokens mostly underperform, and the market does not view them as narrative drivers. Emerging technological concepts are still what people are most concerned about, such as modularization and re-staking, but most of them have not been introduced yet. The continued performance of Bitcoin and the increasing institutional adoption remain strong macro crypto narratives, but the most potent native narrative in today’s market is meme coins.
While many consider meme coins to be nihilistic and essentially useless, their existence is built on viral stories spanning generations, and their activities continue to drive blockchain adoption. Their crucial presence on-chain is not about their value but about blockchain being used as a communication channel to propagate them – as they prepare to become the next expression channel for a broader society. As blockchain gains more traction as a means of communication and cultural exchange, integrating memes into technology places this new media on par with technologies like newspapers, cars, television, and the internet, all of which have had a significant impact on humanity and become globally adopted technologies.
