The typical meme coin reaches its high quickly and spends far longer fading from it, according to a study highlighted by TechFlowPost. The report says most tokens in the sector never make it to a second peak.
The piece was written by Victor Ramirez and translated by Saoirse for Foresight News. It argues that meme coins are closely tied to retail speculation and outsized return narratives, but they have also worked as an efficient way to pull traffic and liquidity into newer blockchain ecosystems. In late 2023, Solana rebounded after the FTX collapse and meme coin trading surged alongside it. Base saw a similar pattern in 2024. More recently, Robinhood Chain has produced a new format that combines meme coins with tokenized stocks.
That same viral, attention-driven structure also makes the lifecycle short. The article says issuance platforms such as shturl.c and PONS lowered the barrier to launching meme coins and amplified the trend. Millions of meme coins have been minted, only a very small share have made it onto centralized exchanges, and fewer still have managed to survive.
How the report defines a meme coin lifecycle
To measure the market lifecycle of a token, the study sets three key 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 estimate a typical market lifespan for meme coins.
The sample includes 150 meme coins from the Talos market database. It is limited to tokens launched after BONK listed in December 2023, the point the report uses to mark the start of the Solana meme coin wave.
The report also spells out 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 issued directly on platforms such as shturl.c were excluded, which means the results likely overstate the real survival time of ordinary low-quality meme coins. Second, the 95% drawdown threshold is a chosen cutoff, and changing that threshold would materially alter the median lifespan calculation.
It also notes that comparing current prices with all-time highs naturally pushes the results in a pessimistic direction. Even so, the report says ATH remains a useful reference point despite only being knowable after the fact. Using local highs instead would introduce even more uncertainty into the price path. The study frames the exercise as a demonstration of an analytical model rather than a claim of absolute statistical precision.
Median time to peak: 17.2 days
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 have just crashed, 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 defined by the point where it crosses 50%.
The headline finding is that the median time from first trade to all-time high was just 17.2 days. One quarter of tokens peaked in 1.6 days. After hitting an all-time high, the median time to a 95% decline from that peak was 370 days.
Return distribution points to weak long-term performance
The report then looks at returns across tokens. A chart of current prices relative to each token’s own all-time high shows that more than half of meme coins are now down 95% from their peak.
For tokens launched during the Solana meme coin era, early returns were clustered in a relatively narrow band before turning into a prolonged decline. Out of 151 sampled tokens, only 5 still trade above their first-day price. After 300 days, most were worth just 10% of their initial value. The article says negative returns were the norm across market-cap tiers. Among the five largest tokens born in the Solana meme coin era, TRUMP, PUMP and PENGUIN were all trading below their issue price at the time of the analysis.
Full lifecycle and the odds of a second high
Looking at the full lifecycle, 50% of meme coins launched during the Solana meme coin era completed the 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.
A Sankey chart in the report tracks where those tokens ended up. Only 19% avoided a 90% decline from their all-time high. Among the 81% that did fall 90% from peak, only 3% ever climbed back to their all-time high.
The report also asks whether traders can tell if a move is only a local top or the final top. Its answer is blunt: historically, meme coins rarely produce more than one meaningful high. Roughly two-thirds of tokens from the Solana era never staged a second rally. They rose once, peaked within days, and never came close to that level again. The remaining one-third took months on average to print their all-time high.
On-chain activity follows a similar pattern
The article extends the same framework to on-chain activity. It tracks active Solana addresses with balances of at least $1 and compares peak address counts with current levels.
The pattern closely matches price behavior. Before activity peaks, there are rarely multiple local spikes. After the first top, activity is also hard to rebuild. For the leading meme coins in the sample, the share of active addresses retained after the activity peak was below 7%, according to the report. The data source cited was Talos CM Network Data Pro.
The report does not say speculation is over
The broad picture is bleak for long-term meme coin performance. Still, the article does not conclude that meme coin speculation has ended. It points instead to the spread of meme coin trading across different platforms as evidence pointing the other way.
The piece says there is little evidence that the asymmetric payoff profile of meme coins exists to reward people for chasing a very low-probability path to sudden wealth. At the same time, it argues that treating meme coin speculation as the product of careful, rational investment decisions would be a category error. The market broadly understands that meme coins have poor long-term investment value, yet new participants keep entering 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, the article says, but blockchains allow these markets to scale efficiently and without access barriers. As more assets become financialized and tokenized on-chain, new speculative formats may keep appearing in unexpected forms.