opinion on memecoins evolution from 2023-2025, trump coin

What makes memecoins go up & Why certain ones do well

the game with memecoins is purely driven off attention, virality, & distribution: you need wide distribution with holder base early on, and steadily increasing attention due to event(s) causing the idea to go viral with follow-on from large capital until attention peaks coincide with market tops
from 2023 to 2025 there have been major changes to the landscape around early distribution with coins and the dynamics of new fresh capital / attention

distribution: reason memecoins are so popular is because they are one of the only opportunities on the internet to make 1000X+ returns in a short amount of time outside of sports betting, the lottery, and casino games, this is the core driver for all memecoin trading activity, the reason this is possible is because memecoins launch at near zero market capitalizations, allowing the earliest traders to hit crazy multiples

this is the main reason distribution is extremely important early on, if the supply of your memecoins is too concentrated in the early stages in the hands of a small # of people, then it is very likely doomed to fail, because these market participants do not need outcomes in the $1B+ mcap range to make millions of dollars, so they are selling much earlier into constrained amounts of liquidity. because memecoins do not have any real business or revenues behind them and trade purely off attention & sentiment, when there is a small early cohort that makes excess gains at the expense of the majority of early traders then it is very difficult to recover

so distribution into hands of as many people as possible is very important, or if there is a group of people with a lot of the supply it sometimes works if they are already wealthy & wont need to sell on the first runup

in 2023, distribution with memecoins was much different than it is now, trading on solana was mostly retail manual click traders with ~90% less snipers & bots, this changes the landscape drastically, snipers are trading with a lot more capital and are only concerned with the first few minutes/hours of launch, while average retail typically has a much longer time horizon for holding since their position sizes are so much smaller - if you are trading $1000 trying to make $1M its much different than someone trading $100k trying to make $100k. the environment of 2023 made it possible for coins to trade at very low market caps and form communities for awhile, e.g. WIF at $100k
attention: memecoins price action tends to trend linearly with how much attention they are getting & will need spark of large capital to start trend, late 2023 was prime conditions for Solana onchain because it could not have been lower with regard to how much $$$ activity was onchain & how much attention was focused onchain. there was a steady inflow of new capital from 1) people not on Solana yet who did not believe it would recover and 2) $SOL holders who were previously very poor but benefitted from the wealth effect of core protocol airdrops and price appreciation of the native token. this combined with there being a small number of coins that you could actually buy onchain created a perfect storm of lopsided supply/demand dynamics. bonk was the first beneficiary of this, as was clearly evident in its runup from sub 50M market cap all the way to $2B

comparably now to mid 2025, you have Solana price sideways mostly for about a year, & mostly everyone who was going to bridge capital over to solana has already done so

celebrity coins and creator capital markets

trump was the culmination of the memecoin supercycle thesis, there was no person on the planet with more attention on them than donald trump right before his inauguration in january of 2025, which as we've already stated is the main reason for memecoins price appreciation. it went to $80B FDV within ~48 hours of launch, doing billions of dollars of trading volume in the process and breaking record highs of all solana onchain & app activity. even though trump coin did go to $80B, it topped within the first 48 hours and has yet to come anywhere close to its all time high price. so why did it top so early? a lot of people argue it was due to the melania launch which definitely contributed, but it was moreso because once everybody already knew the president of the united states had a memecoin there was no possible way to get more attention on the coin than the influx of attention of the first few days. the team did an amazing job of keeping the launch a secret up until the last day, so there was infinite amount of sidelined capital slamming the buyside once the coin dropped, but on the other side, once everyone knew about the coin, what future event could cause $TRUMP to go more viral than it already was? the difference with regular memecoins is that they can continuously get more attention as more people find out about them because at launch they are not known by everybody, but with $TRUMP, everybody already knows who the president is, so the peak of attention comes much earlier than it would with other memecoins that grow organically. unlike businesses with revenues which trade on the expectations of future growth, memecoins only trade higher if they can keep getting more attention
this is the reason that most celebrity memecoins fail also, once the original launch event is done, there is not much more to be done in the lifetime of the coin for it to become more popular, especially with the memecoins that are known about to insiders, because they largest influx of capital will always happen at the very beginning of the coin's creation. for coins attached purely to an individual's likeness to do well, there needs to be some differentiator besides them just being memecoins representative of how popular the person is already. nobody has effectively done this yet, but in theory there should be creative ways to connect the creator's existing businesses to the coin, so that there is future expectations of continued growth & utility around what the coin may be used for.

creator capital markets: celebrity coins, content coins, memecoins, prediction markets are all forms of creator capital markets. this category will continue to get explored for a few reasons: 1) it is blatantly clear that creators drive attention towards markets and events on social media, whether this is when they are writing theses on markets in general, talking about individual coins, or arguing with their followers on specific polls 2) the existing social media model of profitting off of this attention that creators drive towards their applications is incredibly lopsided towards these large companies, the largest creators on instagram, X, youtube, tik tok make a very small portion of revenues comparably to what the large companies make. yes this is changing by the day with implementations like X ad revenue sharing and other initiatives, but it is still very skewed 3) speculation is crypto's greatest use case and the world is trending towards speculation being more commonplace every day.

i dont have a solution for avoiding the early attention peaks that much coins tied to an individual's likeness experience, but i am confident that there will continue to be teams that explore this category and try to solve this problem. whether that is something like time.fun which adds utility to creator markets by allowing speculators to use the coin for getting access to the creator & ask pertinent questions, or whether that is something like zora that creates a flywheel around all content that a creator makes to drive revenue back towards the native token, or whether it is something like melee markets that removes the issue of the ephemerality of attention on events by letting creators create opinion markets & profit from the volume on said markets with a defined expiration date. instead of directing attention to memecoins and the creator having to deal with the backlash of the coin eventually going down after it reaches peak attention, or whether it is something like dare markets that lets creators drive attention to real life events that users can speculate on and participate in
memecoins in 2025

for memecoins to eclipse their previous activity i believe you will need something to create a similar wealth effect that was created from 2023-2024 on Solana, for ETH past couple months the price appreciation has been driven by DATs bringing in new tradfi capital, if this continues on certain chains then i think its possible that crypto natives experience a wealth effect that would also benefit memecoins. also, newer chains have greater possibility of this wealth effect because crypto native onchain capital is very sticky and opportunistic traders are always looking for greener pastures to make profits

new launches are cooked for the most part, believe if there are any memecoins that are going to do well it will be ones that have already traded sideways for a few months, & still have the possibility of experiencing an influx of attention+capital, & do not have the overhead of sniper supply: best example recently has been something like TROLL, possible future examples could be something like NUB or SAN

general sentiment on memecoins is also much worse now than in 2023, back then it was seen as a much more fun and fair game that everyone was playing, & now think people are unhappy with the rake that launchpads are making + the unfair advantage of early traders getting into coins