Meme coins brought traffic to new chains, but the data points to short lifespans
Meme coins are often tied to retail speculation and outsized return stories, yet the report says they have also worked as an efficient way to pull traffic and liquidity into emerging blockchain ecosystems. It points to Solana’s recovery after the FTX collapse in late 2023, when meme coin trading picked up again, then to a similar pattern on Base in 2024. More recently, Robinhood Chain has seen experiments that combine meme coins with tokenized stocks.
That same viral, attention-driven quality also makes the category fragile. Platforms such as shturl.c and PONS lowered the barrier to launching meme coins, amplifying the churn. Millions of meme coins have been minted, but only a small fraction reach centralized exchanges, and fewer still remain active over time.
The report sets out to quantify two questions that are usually discussed anecdotally: how long meme coin market cycles last, and how these assets perform over a longer horizon. It uses a large sample to track the full path from first quoted price to collapse and then reads the sector from a broader market view.
How the study defines a meme coin lifecycle
To map a token’s market life, the report uses three events:
- Start: the token’s first trade on an exchange
- Peak: the meme coin’s all-time high, or ATH
- Crash: a 95% drawdown from that all-time high
The analysis uses the Kaplan-Meier estimator, a statistical method commonly used in clinical trials to estimate median survival time. Here, it is applied to meme coins to estimate a typical market lifespan. The sample includes 150 meme coins from the Talos market database, limited to tokens issued after BONK listed in December 2023 and the Solana meme coin wave began.
The report flags several caveats. First, the sample is biased toward relatively successful tokens because inclusion required market data from at least one centralized exchange. Many meme coins launched directly through platforms such as shturl.c were excluded. That means the results likely overstate the real survival time of ordinary low-quality meme coins. Second, the 95% drawdown threshold is a chosen benchmark, and changing that threshold would materially alter the median lifespan calculation.
It also notes that comparing current prices with all-time highs naturally skews the results in a pessimistic direction. Even so, the all-time high remains a useful reference point. Using local highs instead would introduce even more uncertainty into the price path. The report says the work should be treated as a demonstration of an analytical model, not as an absolute statistical rule.
Key findings: 17.2 days to peak, then a median 370 days to lose 95%
In the Kaplan-Meier survival curve, time moves from left to right. Each time a marked event occurs, the model calculates what share of tokens that have not yet crashed just experienced a crash, then multiplies the conditional survival rates. As long as a token remains within the observation window, it stays in the risk set denominator. Once observation ends, it exits the sample without being marked as crashed. The curve starts at 100% and steps lower over time, with the median located where it crosses 50%.
The central result is blunt. After first trading, the median meme coin reaches its all-time high in just 17.2 days. One quarter of the sample peaks within 1.6 days. After that high is set, the median token takes 370 days to fall 95% from the peak.
Return distribution shows deep losses across most of the sample
The report then shifts from timing to returns. Its chart of current prices relative to each token’s all-time high shows that more than half of meme coins are now down 95% from their peak.
Looking at price performance after listing during the Solana meme coin era, most tokens posted a relatively concentrated range of early gains and then moved into a prolonged decline. Out of 151 sample tokens, only five were still trading above their first-day listing price. After 300 days, most were worth just 10% of their initial value.
According to the report, negative returns dominate regardless of market capitalization. Among the five largest tokens by market cap born in the Solana meme coin era, TRUMP, PUMP, and PENGUIN were all trading below their issue price at the time of the study.
Half of the sample completed the full cycle in 456 days
For meme coins launched during the Solana era, 50% completed the full path from listing to all-time high to a 95% decline within an average of 456 days. By day 1000, about 90% of tokens had fallen 95% from their peak.
The report also uses a Sankey diagram to show where meme coins end up. Only 19% avoided a 90% decline from their all-time high. Of the 81% that did fall 90% from the peak, the report goes on to discuss what happened next, but the broad takeaway remains the same: most tokens did not recover to prior highs.
Most meme coins do not get a second rally
The study raises a practical trading question: when a market is running hard, there is no reliable way to know whether the move has reached a local top or the final top. Still, the historical sample suggests meme coins rarely produce more than one meaningful peak.
Roughly two-thirds of meme coins from the Solana era never saw a second rebound. They rose once, peaked within days, and never came close to that level again. The remaining one-third took months on average to set an all-time high.
On-chain activity follows the same pattern
The report extends the same framework to on-chain activity. It counts active Solana addresses with balances of at least $1 and compares the peak number of addresses with current levels.
The pattern closely matches price action. Before activity peaks, there are few repeated local surges. After the first peak, activity is hard to rebuild. For the leading meme coins in the sample, fewer than 7% of active addresses remained after activity peaked. The source for this part of the analysis is Talos CM Network Data Pro.
The report does not say speculation is over
The overall picture is weak, but the report stops short of declaring the end of meme coin speculation.
Instead, it argues that meme coin trading is spreading across more platforms, which points in the opposite direction. The report says there is little evidence that the asymmetric payoff profile of meme coins exists to reward people for chasing extremely low-probability wealth outcomes. At the same time, treating meme coin speculation as the product of careful, rational investment decisions would also miss the point. Even if the market broadly understands that meme coins have poor long-term investment value, new participants continue to enter the trade.
Its closing view is that speculation is rooted in market culture rather than in any specific trading infrastructure. Speculation is not unique to blockchains, but blockchains allow these markets to expand efficiently and without access barriers. As more assets become financialized and tokenized on-chain, new forms of speculation may keep appearing in unexpected ways.
The original article was written by Victor Ramirez and translated by Saoirse for Foresight News.