Meme coins are often tied to retail speculation and outsized return narratives, but the sector has also served as a fast way to pull attention and liquidity into newer blockchain ecosystems. In the study cited by MarsBit, author Victor Ramirez pointed to several recent waves: Solana’s rebound after the FTX collapse in late 2023, a similar pattern on Base in 2024, and more recently, experiments on Robinhood Chain that combine meme coins with tokenized stocks.
That same viral quality also tends to shorten their lifespan. With issuance platforms such as shturl.c and PONS lowering the barrier to launch, millions of meme coins have been minted. Only a small fraction make it onto centralized exchanges, and fewer still remain relevant over time.
How the report defines a meme coin lifecycle
The report set 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 defined three key events in a token’s lifecycle:
- 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
To estimate a typical lifecycle, the study used the Kaplan-Meier estimator, a statistical method commonly used in clinical trials to measure median survival time. The sample came from the Talos market database and covered 150 meme coins issued after BONK’s listing in December 2023, when the Solana meme coin wave began to accelerate.
The report also flagged several limitations. First, the sample is tilted toward relatively successful tokens because inclusion required market data from at least one centralized exchange. Many meme coins launched directly on platforms such as shturl.c were excluded, which means the results likely overstate the real survival time of ordinary low-quality meme tokens. Second, the 95% drawdown threshold is an arbitrary choice, and changing that threshold would materially alter the median lifespan calculation.
It added another caution: comparing current prices with all-time highs naturally makes the outcome look pessimistic. Even so, the report argued that ATH remains a useful reference point, while using local highs instead would introduce even more uncertainty into the price path. The authors framed the work as a demonstration of an analytical model rather than a claim of absolute statistical precision.
Survival analysis shows fast peaks and slow collapses
The meme coin lifecycle survival curve in the report was sourced from Talos CM Market Data Pro. Under the Kaplan-Meier framework, the estimator moves from left to right through time. Each time a marked event occurs, the model calculates what share of tokens that have not yet crashed just experienced a crash, then multiplies those conditional survival rates over time. Tokens remain in the risk set as long as they stay within the observation window; once observation ends, they leave 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 finding was stark. The median time from first trade to all-time high was only 17.2 days, and one quarter of tokens peaked in 1.6 days. From the all-time high to a 95% drawdown, the median time stretched to 370 days.
More than half are down 95% from peak
The report then turned to return distribution. Looking at current prices relative to each token’s own all-time high, it found that more than half of meme coins were down 95% from peak.
Price performance after listing followed a similar pattern across most of the sample. Early returns were clustered in a relatively narrow window, then drifted into a prolonged decline. Out of 151 sampled tokens, only 5 were still trading above their first-day price. After 300 days, most had fallen to just 10% of their initial value. The report said negative returns were the norm across market-cap tiers.
Among the five largest tokens by market capitalization from the Solana meme coin era, TRUMP, PUMP and PENGUIN were all trading below their issue price at the time of the study.
Half of tokens completed the full cycle in about 456 days
For meme coins launched during the Solana meme coin era, 50% completed the full path from listing to all-time high to a 95% decline within an average of 456 days. By day 1,000, about 90% of tokens had fallen 95% from their peak.
A Sankey chart in the report mapped where those tokens ended up. Only 19% avoided a 90% decline from their all-time high. The other 81% did at some point fall 90% from peak.
Two-thirds of meme coins never managed a second rally
The report then addressed a practical trading question: when a token is surging, is the market looking at a local top or the final top?
Its historical answer was blunt. Meme coins rarely produce more than one meaningful peak. In the Solana era, two-thirds of meme coins never saw a second rebound. They rose once, topped out within days, and never came close to that level again. The remaining one-third took months on average to reach their all-time high.
On-chain activity followed the same pattern
The study also ran a similar analysis on on-chain activity. It tracked active Solana addresses with balances of at least $1 and compared peak address counts with current levels.
The pattern closely matched price behavior. Before activity hit its top, there were almost no repeated local spikes. Once activity peaked for the first time, it was difficult to recover. For the leading meme coins in the sample, less than 7% of active addresses remained after the activity peak, according to Talos CM Network Data Pro.
The data look weak, but speculation has not disappeared
Overall, the report’s data point to a weak long-term picture for the meme coin market. It stopped short of saying the trade is over, though. Instead, it noted that meme coin activity has spread across more platforms, which suggests the opposite.
The report said there is little evidence that meme coins’ asymmetric payoff structure exists to reward people for chasing a very low-probability path to sudden wealth. At the same time, treating meme coin speculation as the product of careful, rational investment decisions would also miss the point. Market participants broadly understand that meme coins have poor long-term investment value, yet new entrants keep joining the trade.
In the report’s framing, speculation is rooted in market culture rather than in any specific trading infrastructure. Blockchain did not invent speculation, but it did make these markets easier to scale and easier to access. As more assets become financialized and tokenized on-chain, new forms of speculative trading may keep appearing in unexpected ways.