Memecoins are a curious phenomenon in the cryptocurrency world – digital tokens born out of internet culture and viral hype. At first glance, investing in something with no inherent value seems illogical. Yet, these tokens have repeatedly attracted millions of dollars, driven entirely by collective excitement and the willingness of communities to pool resources.
Cryptocurrency launchpad Pump.fun, built on Solana, supercharged the memecoin boom by letting anyone create and trade tokens instantly. This near-frictionless system triggered a surge of hyper-fast launches, with some coins briefly hitting multi-million-dollar valuations. Quickly, the platform became the busiest hub for ‘pumping’ memecoins, becoming a symbol of the 2025 memecoin boom, particularly on crypto Twitter, Telegram, and Discord.
To dive deeply into memecoin pump-and-dump behaviours, the team at BestBrokers set out to track these wallets and tokens, noting liquidity spikes, hype cycles, and patterns that mirrored the wider market. We also analysed additional market data from cryptocurrency analytics platform CoinMarketCap to assess broader trends and valuation dynamics. Fresh data suggests memecoins on Pump.fun may now be following the path of NFTs: the speculative frenzy is cooling as liquidity thins and traders grow more cautious.
Key findings from the report:
- Monthly memecoin trading volume fell 85% in the past year, from $20.7B in Dec 2024 to just $3.2B by Dec 2025, according to CoinMarketCap data.
- New token launches on Pump.fun dropped from a peak of 60k/day in January 2025 to under 20k/day by December 2025.
- Solana memecoins are still rising fast despite a cooling market, with standout tokens like Fartcoin ($370M), Pippin ($200M), and Alchemist AI ($195M) having reached impressive valuations within months of launch.
How Solana’s Memecoins Stack Up Against Global Counterparts
Despite boasting several breakout tokens that have gone on to trade widely beyond their launch platform, Pump.fun’s ecosystem still sits some distance behind the long-established, decentralised exchanges. Standout Solana projects such as Fartcoin at roughly $370 million in market cap, Pippin at around $200 million, and Alchemist AI just under $195 million have achieved remarkable valuations, considering that the vast majority of tokens on the platform are less than two years old as of December 2025.
While several Solana-based memecoins now rank among the 20 largest memecoins on the market right now, their capitalisations remain a fraction of giants like Dogecoin ($22.9B), Shiba Inu ($5.1B), MemeCore ($2.3B) and Pepe ($1.96B). These larger assets typically benefit from deeper liquidity, longer trading histories, and stronger infrastructure, with many being Ethereum-based or using their own chain, such as Dogecoin, built on Litecoin, itself a fork of Bitcoin.
What this contrast really highlights is that Solana tokens excel at generating early momentum, even if that initial excitement has not yet translated into lasting market presence. On Pump.fun, a token can surge to $50-$100 million within days, as seen with Peanut The Squirrel, Moo Deng and BAYC AI, but these assets are simply far too new to have developed the liquidity or long-term holder bases of the larger and older memecoins.
Loss of Momentum
Daily Pump.fun Platform Users Over the Past Year
Tracking new and recurring users on pump.fun from December 2024 to December 2025
Pump.fun’s user activity over the past 12 months shows a pronounced rise-and-cool cycle that mirrors the wider memecoin hype pattern. Daily new-user numbers peaked in December 2024, when the platform recorded 185,837 sign-ups in a single day. Much of this surge was fuelled by Solana’s strong resurgence in the fourth quarter of 2024, which brought a wave of retail traders back into fast, low-cost on-chain speculation. During this period, Pump.fun became one of the most popular places to launch and trade new tokens. A run of viral memecoin successes, alongside heavy promotion from creators and influencers, added to the momentum, drawing in large numbers of newcomers hoping to capture the kinds of rapid gains seen by early traders.
What goes up must come down, and the platform’s early-2025 growth appears to have hit a wall. The flood of daily registrations gradually slowed as the platform became saturated with thousands of nearly identical, short-lived tokens. By August, daily new-wallet signups had dropped to 40,000-60,000, and by early December 2025, they fell further to roughly 30,000 a day, an 84% drop from last year’s peak. The traders who once churned out dozens of tokens daily are now pacing themselves, waiting for the next big opportunity or moving on entirely.
Fewer Users Means Fewer Tokens Being Generated
Daily Token Generation on Pump.fun Over The Past Year
Tracking daily memecoin launches on Pump.fun from December 2024 to December 2025
During the last year, Pump.fun experienced one of the most dramatic boom-and-bust cycles in recent crypto history. Token launches exploded in early 2025, with daily creations peaking around 60,000 new tokens per day in January and February. This frenzy coincided with the rise of several now-prominent Solana memecoins, including Fartcoin, Pippin, and Alchemist AI. By March, daily token creation had dropped sharply, fluctuating between 20,000 and 30,000 per day. Only a small number of early-year standouts continued to grow, showing that a few outliers managed to gain traction, despite the oversaturated environment.
This trend continued into the second half of 2025, dropping to a year-low of 15,000-18,000 in September and October. Despite the general decline, December saw a modest rebound: daily token counts frequently exceeded 20,000, compared with 13,000-21,000 in late September and October, suggesting that some traders remained eager to experiment with new tokens.
Part of this dynamic, however, seems to be shaped by automated activity rather than purely human behaviour. Recent research from ForkLog and The Cryptonomist indicates that most high-volume wallets are automated, with bots inflating liquidity, executing ultra-fast ‘snipes’ at launch, and cycling trades to manufacture the illusion of demand. In some cases, bots dominate 60-80% of trading for a single token, effectively shaping price action before real users can participate. Another study by Bitget points out the unusually short median hold times for Solana memecoins, consistent with bot-driven trading patterns.
This heavy bot presence means that much of Pump.fun’s market activity isn’t organic. Price spikes can be misleading, token distribution becomes skewed, and retail traders face higher risks of being frontrun or dumped on by automated wallets. While token generation remains high, a notable portion of activity is engineered rather than reflective of genuine user demand.
Market Caps Collapse as Liquidity Dries Up
If user activity and token creation illustrate the inner workings of the Pump.fun ecosystem, broader market metrics reveal just how much real demand remains for memecoins, and this shows a clear decline. Across 2025, both trading volume and total memecoin market capitalisation experienced steep and sustained drops, suggesting that the broader speculative appetite that once fueled record-breaking activity is rapidly evaporating.
Total monthly trading volume plunged from $20.7 billion in December 2024 to just $3.2 billion by December 2025, an 85% contraction in liquidity over the course of the year. Market capitalisation followed a similar trajectory, falling from $123.6 billion to $41.3 billion, shedding roughly two-thirds of memecoins’ aggregate value. Even temporary rebounds, such as the August spike to $10.11 billion, failed to reverse the overall downtrend, reflecting short-lived hype cycles rather than durable investor interest.
Beyond the Hype: The State of the Memecoin Market As We Enter 2026
Pump.fun’s declining token quality, shrinking user growth, and the early-stage nature of its top coins exemplify the broader post-hype contraction of the memecoin market: the speculative fervour that once propelled countless meme-inspired tokens is gradually fading. In this context, Pump.fun acts as both a barometer and a microcosm of the wider memecoin cycle, a market highly sensitive to hype and sentiment, where early winners are increasingly outnumbered by failed experiments. Much like NFTs before them, memecoins now appear to be entering a phase defined by consolidation and a shift towards assets capable of sustaining long-term interest.
Methodology
This report analyses the performance and market dynamics of memecoins over the past 12 months, focusing on user growth, daily token generation, trading volume, and market capitalisation. Daily and monthly data were used to track trends in new-user adoption, token issuance, and liquidity across top memecoins, providing insight into speculative activity and market health. Figures were sourced from Dune Analytics, CoinMarketCap, and CoinGecko, using data between December 2024 and December 2025. The analysis highlights correlations between user activity, token generation, and market metrics to identify the post-hype contraction phase of the memecoin market.