A meme coin is the purest form of crypto speculation: a token with no business behind it, whose price is what the next buyer will pay. That sounds like a criticism and it is also a description. Some meme coins have lasted for years because a community decided they should. Most last days.
This guide explains how they work, where they come from and why the odds are what they are. For what can go wrong deliberately, see what a rug pull is.
What makes a coin a meme coin?
Three things, usually together: an identity borrowed from internet culture, no product or cash flow, and a community that is the main reason anyone holds it. The first meme coin, Dogecoin, was launched in December 2013 by Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer as a joke about crypto's hype, with the Shiba Inu "doge" meme on its face. The joke outlived the hype it was mocking.
| Meme coin | Utility token | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is for | Being held and traded; belonging | Paying for or governing a product |
| Where value comes from | Attention and community | Demand for the product, at least in theory |
| Team | Often anonymous, often gone | Usually a company or foundation |
| Typical launch | Minutes, on a launchpad | Months, with a whitepaper |
| Typical outcome | Near zero within weeks | Varies widely |
How are meme coins launched?
Today most start on Solana through pump.fun, which made launching a token a one-minute form. The coin begins on a bonding curve: a pricing formula held by pump.fun's program, where each buy raises the price and each sell lowers it, with no separate pool anyone has to fund. When enough has been bought, the coin "graduates": its liquidity moves to a regular trading pool, and the pool's LP tokens are burned so nobody can withdraw the liquidity later.
That design closed some of the old ways to rug a token. A pump.fun coin has a fixed supply and no mint or freeze authority, and its graduated pool cannot be pulled. It did not close the rest: a creator can still buy early and sell into the first wave, and that is what most do. Our checklist for Solana tokens covers both halves.
What moves a meme coin's price?
Attention, almost entirely. A post from a large account, a listing on a trending bar, a Spaces session, a new exchange: anything that brings new buyers raises the price, because the supply is fixed and the pool is small. The same thing works in reverse, faster. With little liquidity, one large holder selling can move the price by double digits in a minute.
Over weeks, the thing that matters is whether anyone is still working on it. Meme coins have no earnings to fall back on, so a coin whose community goes quiet simply drifts down. Some communities pay for promotion out of their own pockets to stop that, which brings its own risks, as the Epileptic token found when its holders' marketing money went to a takeover leader who stopped leading.
How many meme coins survive?
Very few. Solidus Labs looked at every pump.fun token from January 2024 to March 2025: more than seven million were deployed with at least five trades, and only about 97,000 still had more than $1,000 of liquidity at the end. The study classed 98.6% of them as showing rug-pull or pump-and-dump behaviour. pump.fun disputed the report.
Read the odds as a buyer. If you buy a new meme coin at random, the overwhelmingly likely outcome is that it goes to nearly nothing. The ones that last are the exceptions people write about, which is why they seem more common than they are.
What does a meme coin that lasts look like?
Usually less like a coin and more like a club. The survivors tend to have a strong symbol, holders who show up without being paid, and some way of surviving the departure of whoever started it. The Epileptic token, 🟥🟩, is a small example. It launched on pump.fun in November 2024 with an emoji ticker, lost its leadership twice in three months and was taken back by its holders. It has 16,796 holders today and a market cap of $307K: small, alive and run by its community. The full account is in the Epileptic Cult guide.
That is what survival looks like for most meme coins that manage it: not a chart going to the moon, but a group of people still there two years later. If you follow the market, Cryptopulse shows whether crypto as a whole is up or down today and why, from every story this site classifies.
Questions people ask
Are meme coins a good investment?
We do not give investment advice. What the data says is that the large majority of meme coins lose almost all their value, and that the ones which survive are rarely the ones a newcomer buys first. Only put in money you are prepared to lose completely.
How do meme coins make money?
They do not generate any. A holder only profits by selling to someone who pays more, so every gain is another buyer's cost. The platforms and the creators earn trading fees; the coin itself earns nothing.
What was the first meme coin?
Dogecoin, launched in December 2013 by Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer as a joke about the crypto hype of the time, with the Shiba Inu "doge" meme as its face.
What is the difference between a meme coin and a token?
A token is any asset issued on an existing blockchain, such as Solana or Ethereum. A meme coin is one kind of token, defined by what drives its price: culture and community instead of a product or a protocol.
What is a cult coin?
Informal slang for a meme coin whose holders behave like a movement, with shared symbols, rituals and a habit of showing up for each other. The Epileptic token's holders call themselves the Epileptic Cult.