2025 Meme coin Explosion Data Panorama: Transformation from Marginal Product to a $63.6 Billion Market

The Brutal Growth of Meme Coin

Do you remember how Meme coins were once ridiculed by the entire coin community? From a community joke to now, this type of asset has become one of the most insane speculative products in the crypto market—affecting liquidity, driving sentiment, and even shaping brand value. Marketing departments are starting to consider issuing Meme coins to boost user engagement; hedge funds are also secretly allocating small positions in high-volatility Meme coins.

This is no longer an obscure topic. Let's see what the data says.

Explosive Growth of Market Size

In 2024, the total capital of Meme coin grew by over 500%. Where did this money come from? A large amount of speculative funds poured into Meme altcoins from mainstream coins in early 2025. Suddenly, the U.S. SEC reclassified many Meme coins as “collectibles” instead of securities—thus weakening the regulatory protections for investors.

The market figures are very intuitive: the total market value of Meme coins is about $63.6 billion, accounting for 5-7% of the global cryptocurrency market. The 24-hour trading volume reached $7.61 billion. However, this scale is mainly monopolized by the top coins—DOGE, SHIB, and PEPE control about 90% of the capital in the entire field.

The Infinite Loop of Issuance Craze

In early 2025, an average of over 800,000 new Meme coins are born each month. In January alone, 1.7 million were issued. Some platforms even claim to have issued several million.

The question arises: the vast majority of these coins do not survive more than a week. The issuance platform Pump.fun has reported that the ratio of new coins that “upgrade” to mainstream DEXs is less than 1%. The platform itself is also embroiled in federal lawsuits—accused of charging nearly $500 million in fees, with 98% of the over 11 million tokens issued going to zero within 24 hours.

In fact, the survival rate of newly issued coins is extremely low. The survival rate after 60 days is less than 8%, and most tokens lose over 97% of their peak value.

The SOL ecosystem has been hijacked by Meme coins

The economic activities on the Solana chain are now highly dependent on Meme coins—over 60% of the ecological transactions are related to this. What does the specific distribution look like?

Telegram bots accounted for 26% of application revenue, mainly due to automated trading and bulk coin issuance. Meme coin issuance platforms accounted for 23%. Wallet services contributed 18%. Trading applications accounted for 14%. These four sectors account for 81% of SOL's ecological economic activities, while other functions have become supporting roles.

DEX only accounts for 4%—many Meme coin traders don't use traditional decentralized exchanges at all; they prefer the thrill of bots and issuance platforms.

Volatile Trading Volume

In the first quarter of 2025, the trading volume of Meme coins accounted for a quarter of the total cryptocurrency trading volume. However, from January to April, this sector dropped by 58%, and the trading volume also declined by 63%.

By mid-year, the situation eased a bit. DOGE maintained a daily trading volume of over $500 million, while PEPE reached $760 million. By early October, the daily trading volume of the top Meme coins returned to over $9 billion.

The daily trading volume of the Pump.fun issuance platform fluctuates between $96 million and $320 million, depending on how many new coins are issued that day. By the fourth quarter of 2025, its historical total trading volume had exceeded $73 billion.

But here is a reality: among all the issued Meme coins, less than 5% can maintain trading enthusiasm after the first 72 hours. What truly drives the surge in trading is viral spread, celebrity endorsements, and influencer promotion—usually able to grow by 2 to 5 times within a few hours.

Popular Cryptocurrencies Theme

Animal series dominate absolutely——DOGE, Shiba Inu, BONK, and WIF have a total market value exceeding 30 billion USD in 2025. BONK is even set to achieve the milestone of burning 1 trillion coins.

Frog and Amphibian Theme led by PEPE, with daily trading volume surging to $1.7 billion in July, and social heat increasing by 27% month-on-month.

Political Satire Coin went crazy during major political events. $TRUMP's market cap surged to $27 billion within 24 hours of its launch, but later the volatility erased $5 billion just minutes after the peak. About 80% of the coin's supply is controlled by Trump and his associates. Its issuance generated over $350 million in sales and platform fees. In just a few weeks, over 700 Trump-themed imitation coins emerged, among which 192 used family member names, and 67 even boasted “official” branding—this is the level of chaos in the Meme coin space.

Pop Culture Related Coin can achieve daily price peaks of 300-600% during its trending period on the X platform.

Volatility: This crazy number

The daily price volatility of Meme coins averages over 11.7%, far higher than other altcoins or Bitcoin. Some coins, such as POPCAT, have previously demonstrated a single-day volatility of 53%. The U.S. SEC explicitly warned in February 2025 that the risk level of Meme coins is higher than most crypto assets.

In 2025, the Meme coin sector had an average return rate of +1,313% in the first half of the year—this was the only profitable crypto sector during that period. However, on the eve of the third quarter, the average profit and loss was only +33.08%, and it was supported by only a few star coins.

Is the performance of new coins predictable? The best-performing Meme coins in 2025 achieve an average return on initial investment of 150%. But on the other hand, the worst performers may disappear entirely.

The Truth About the Robot Army

On platforms like Pump.fun, up to 80% of early trading volume is driven by sniper bots. These programs can trade in less than a second after new coin liquidity events, many times faster than humans. In some issuances, trades by bots account for over 70% of unique wallet interactions within the first 10 blocks.

Complex sniper bots can monitor DEX memory pools, analyze new contract deployments, and anticipate thousands of issuances each month. They simulate organic order flow by randomizing wallet rotations and transaction intervals, providing liquidity for over 100 new coins daily.

How exaggerated are the results? A single sniper bot accumulated over $6.8 million in profit in just one month through Pump.fun, with a single trade return rate as high as 2227 times. During the peak period in 2024, the sniper bot realized over 15,000 SOL in profit from thousands of trades.

Chain Diversification and Cross-Chain Risks

The issuance of Meme coins is migrating to chains with transaction fees below $0.01—SOL, BNB, and Base now account for 95% of the new Meme coin issuance. Ethereum's market share fell below 5% in the second quarter.

By mid-2025, the BNB chain accounted for 45% of the trading volume on Meme coin DEXs, surpassing SOL's 25% and Ethereum's 20%.

Multi-chain deployment has become a trend. Among the top 100 Meme coins, 21% have implemented cross-chain minting/burning mechanisms. Over 13 million independent wallet addresses interacted with multi-chain Meme coins. During the second quarter, the volume of cross-chain bridging grew by 420% during celebrity coin promotions and major airdrops.

But this comes at a cost. As of September 2025, security incidents related to multi-chain bridging have caused holders to incur losses exceeding $190 million.

Ghost Stories of Security Audits

In the Meme coins issued in 2025, less than 15% have undergone any form of smart contract audit. Over 25% of the audited SOL Meme coin smart contracts have been flagged for having centralized token distribution risks. More than 91% of new Meme coins on the Base chain have at least one security vulnerability.

The main attack modes include issuance and destruction logic vulnerabilities, as well as owner withdrawal vulnerabilities. Automated bot-driven sandwich attacks and front-running vulnerabilities have led to market manipulation in over 35% of low liquidity funding pools.

Since 2025, the entire cryptocurrency services sector has lost over $2.17 billion. Analysts estimate that up to 95% of newly issued coins may involve scams or belong to low-success probability projects.

The True Portrait of Investors

About 31% of American cryptocurrency investors say they first encountered cryptocurrency through Meme coins. Young investors are more active in this field.

Most Meme coin holders have small positions, usually accounting for less than 1% of the total portfolio. However, some large holders or “whales” may control 20-50% of the circulating supply of certain coins. Many retail investors enter the market in the medium term after seeing short-term gains, directly exposing themselves to the risk of price reversal. Institutional investors are starting to show interest, but mainly through structured thematic funds or small allocations in alternative asset classes.

Social-Driven Madness

The mentions of #Meme币# and related tags are expected to grow by about 53% from January 2024 to 2025, surpassing the discussion heat of many altcoin sectors. X, Reddit, Discord, and TikTok are the main drivers of sentiment. However, comment bots and fake accounts have exaggerated engagement, obscuring genuine interest.

Many active Discord or Telegram group members of Meme coin communities exceed 50,000 to 100,000. Some projects hold Meme contests, AMAs, and NFT giveaways to stimulate viral spread. Viral memes, influencer posts, and coordinated activities can trigger price changes of over 20% within a few hours.

The Current State of Blockchain Distribution

Since its creation in January 2024, Pump.fun on the SOL chain has issued over 6 million Meme coins. In February 2025, when the market cooled down, the daily issuance of coins fell from a peak of 70,000 to 25,000. By mid-year, the platform supported an average daily issuance of 65,000 SOL Meme coins and also expanded to the Base chain through API.

The trading volume of SOL's Meme coin DEX reached a peak of $206 billion in January 2025, accounting for 79% of the total trading activity of SOL that month. However, there is a harsh reality: less than 2.1% of SOL Meme coins can “upgrade” from the issuance platform to mainstream DEXs like Raydium, and most cannot establish sustainable liquidity at all.

Fragmentation of liquidity continues to exist. Successful Meme coins are often distributed across 3-5 main chains, but many liquidity pools on each chain remain shallow. Projects utilizing chain-agnostic token contracts can achieve a 2-3 times wider distribution, but wallet retention rates are 17% lower than that of single-chain counterparts.

Historical Review and Future Expectations

During the bear market cycle of 2023-2024, the price of Meme coin fell by 85%. Over 60% of coins failed to survive six months. However, between the first and second quarters of 2024, the market value of Meme coin grew by over 550%, surpassing most other sectors.

In 2024, the trading volume of Meme coins surged to over $35 billion for the entire year. The market capitalization of DOGE remained above $10 billion throughout the year. PEPE and FLOKI recorded returns exceeding 100 times from issuance to peak.

For price predictions, the average price of Meme coin in 2025 is expected to be $0.0226, with a potential high of $0.0245. In 2026, it is expected to rise to $0.0278, an increase of 23% compared to 2025. The prediction for 2027 is $0.0379. By 2030, with the popularity of applications, the average price may reach $0.0572. The long-term outlook for 2031 is $0.0811, representing an increase of over 250% compared to the level in 2025.

Conclusion

Meme coin is no longer an edge product. Evolving from community jokes into a market of 63.6 billion dollars, it now plays an important role in crypto speculation. But the other side of the profit is the disproportionate risk - scams, hacks, and relentless volatility.

Those who venture into this field need to understand: stringent due diligence, on-chain analysis, and community signals are not optional, but necessities. Behind every digit is a real flow of funds and risk exposure.