Failure of meme coin this past years

[Tyatya]

The meme‑coin scene has basically hit a perfect storm. Over the past year more than 3.7 million tokens have gone belly‑up, with roughly half of those disappearing in the first quarter of 2025 alone  That’s a staggering number of projects that never found any real traction beyond a quick pump on platforms like Pump.fun, which has spawned millions of low‑effort coins and now sees massive outflows as investors pull back 

A few things are driving the fallout:

Massive sell‑offs and liquidations The broader crypto market slumped, wiping out about $500 billion in value in just three days and blowing out $1.7 billion in leveraged positions  When the tide turns, meme coins being the most speculative get hit hardest.

Pump‑and‑dump schemes!
High‑profile scams like the LIBRA and  MELANIA tokens, both tied to political figures, collapsed after insiders dumped millions, erasing billions in market cap  Those stories scare retail investors away.

Regulatory pressureWith the U.S. “Bitcoin Act” and other rules looming, projects that rely on anonymity or lack KYC are feeling the heat. The scrutiny is pushing some meme coins to either clean up their act or fade away 

Loss of trust!
 Repeated rug pulls and the sheer volume of dead tokens have eroded confidence. Investors are now rotating out of pure‑meme plays and into projects with actual utility, like the PayFi token Remittix, which has attracted former Shiba Inu holders 

Shift to utility!
 Even some of the surviving meme coins are trying to add real use cases (e.g., ShibaSynth’s synthetic assets, PepeDAO’s governance model) to stay relevant The market is rewarding those that can move beyond a catchy name.

In short, the fallout is a mix of market‑wide crashes, high‑profile scams, tightening regulation, and a growing demand for substance over hype. If a meme coin can adapt add utility, improve transparency, maybe even get a regulated listing like BONK’s Swiss ETP it might survive the shake‑out. Otherwise, it’s likely to join the graveyard of the millions that never made it past the meme stage.

[o48o]

If they had no "real" value to begin with, should be rather look for reasons on why they were pumped in the first place?

And when people talk about "real" or "real world" use cases, they seem to be just copy paste meta use cases for crypto economy that already existed. It's just more snake oil then substance.

And when it comes to "Synthetic assets", they are just overhyped pegged tokens masquerading behind terms like "RWA". Stocks are actual RWA, synthetics are just poor shadows of them.

[passwordnow]

Just think of it that most of the memes have no utility at all. Even if it gets a huge hype from the platforms and the community of it, it will remain as a meme. And later on, that's where things are going to change from its development. The devs are going to be stagnant and if they're able to make some money out of it, the development won't happen anymore because even them, they understand what the market needs and these coins if made just a memecoin, they'll be ending it with a memecoin as well. What utility they need? as a payment? as a rewards, etc? we already have got a bunch of those coins that have the same utility as them.

[Cointxz]

Meme coin has no real utility aside from the promise of price growth in the long run by listing on exchange.

It’s a total failure even if you follow those meme coin that becomes so hype in the past like Shib, Pepe and other shits since meme coin investors just keep jumping on every new meme coin when they have opportunity to buy and sell because they knew that these tokens has no use case in the long run.

It’s a compete failure and the only successful meme coin that I can consider is just Doge.

[Hispo]

All of it was written on the wall, really, if you think about it meme coins are nothing but especulative media and in the worst case scenario scam instruments for developers and those behind the project to profit off hype and ignorance of others.
There are actual memecoins which are not scams, but those are the minority on the market, as it stands today it is better to stay with time proven projects and only gamble with memecoins using money which could be considered as non-necessary for one's daily life.

I have always thought memecoins are sometimes used for people to gamble their money, believing they will become rich over night.

[coin-investor]

They should have vanished years ago, but it’s too tempting to invest in these pump-and-dump kind of coins for gullible investors.
Not knowing that it’s a scheme meant to scam new investors.
The majority of memes lack use cases; they are narrative-driven, and their longevity is questionable. I've had enough of investing in these memes; they may look good on paper, but they’re just all promises, part of misleading marketing.

[PostQuantumBTC]

They should have vanished years ago, but it’s too tempting to invest in these pump-and-dump kind of coins for gullible investors.

They should not vanish because the remaining altcoins are also as shit as meme (shit) coins. Crypto is full of shit, if you do not know how to navigate crypto, all your money can be gone within hours or few days. I do not think meme coins are something that will vanish but they will remain. If they pump in next bull run, it can also help solana price if another network do not dominate.

[Somegory]

Meme coins had value and now they are down, that's why you are complaining, everyone rushed $Trump when it was released, someone I knew made thousands of dollars from that one meme coin alone, I am sure he won't dare say that meme coins are a failure, you only should raise this complain if everything else is pumping and meme coins are dumping, what is happening now is happening to everything in the market, there is nothing wrong with meme coins.

[BattleDog]

The "failure" here is mostly just the business model working as designed.

A lot of these 2024-2025 memes weren't trying to be Doge or even early SHIB. They were scratch tickets with a ticker. Pump.fun, TG bots, launchpads, whatever - the product was akin to spinning the wheel, maybe you could get a 10x before the devs vanish. If you look at them that way, 3.7M dead tokens isn't a surprise at all. It's just the natural end state.

Where I agree with you guys is on the "retrofit utility" part. Once a meme team starts talking about RWAs, synthetic yield, real-world payments etc., you can almost smell that the hype graph has already rolled over. Real utility is boring and full of legal/accounting work. Meme coins live on attention and reflexivity. When attention leaves, the devs either disappear or try to duct tape a use case on top, which almost never beats the hundreds of projects that started with that use case from day one.

The interesting pattern across cycles is that 99.9% of meme coins go to zero, a handful become cultural artifacts with staying power (DOGE, maybe one or two from this era), and everything in the middle just slowly bleeds out while people argue about whether it ever had potential.

[gunhell16]

They should have vanished years ago, but it’s too tempting to invest in these pump-and-dump kind of coins for gullible investors.
Not knowing that it’s a scheme meant to scam new investors.
The majority of memes lack use cases; they are narrative-driven, and their longevity is questionable. I've had enough of investing in these memes; they may look good on paper, but they’re just all promises, part of misleading marketing.

Up to now, there are still thousands of meme coins being created in this crypto space. Just in the meme coin category alone, according to what I've learned, there are already around 20,000 to 50,000 meme coins in existence at this time.

And it's no longer surprising because there are also millions of people who hope that they might strike gold with a meme coin investment even with a very small capital. They're likely gambling on this because they've read past news about others who got rich from meme coins with only a small amount invested, and they believe the same thing could still happen to them today.

[Odohu]

I will not call that failure because by the definition of failure, memecoins do not fit in. They failed to do what if I may ask? There memecoins, designed for fun and nothing more than that. Ordinarily they have no value so the value attached to they were arbitrary and unsubstantiated which is why when the value is eroded, it cannot be held against those innocent memecoins. Those who buy memecoins and expect them to pump and make them rich are the biggest jokers in the crypto world.

[programmer3666]

honestly memecoins have just collapse in a very terrible manner since late year, a lot of tokens that once looked like they have future has just failed and most of their crash is pathly due to this annoying sell of, pup & dump scams all over and also some new regulations being introduced into the ecosystem and not to forget the lost of trust due to this repeated rug pulls that was seen as a norm mid of this year! from look of things i think invstors are aligning with coins with reasonable utilities and the way meme projects are beginning to disappear and getting delisted from exchanges, only those ones that clearly have transparency and usefulness will survive this terrible cycle.

[NNRR]

Hype and community can go a long way, but not survival. The disappearance of half of the 3.7 million tokens proves that the market now wants something beyond easy liquidity and quick pumps. Pump-and-dumps, rag-pools, political tokens, these events have destroyed trust, and naturally people are now moving away from utility-driven projects.

Today's reality is very simple -

• There is no trust without transparency
• There is no future without utility
• There is no acceptance without community

The funny thing is that some of the surviving meme coins are now adding “non-meme” features themselves, which may be the only way to survive. The market no longer wants just memes, but value. Those who can provide that will survive.

[fullfitlarry]

honestly memecoins have just collapse in a very terrible manner since late year, a lot of tokens that once looked like they have future has just failed and most of their crash is pathly due to this annoying sell of, pup & dump scams all over and also some new regulations being introduced into the ecosystem and not to forget the lost of trust due to this repeated rug pulls that was seen as a norm mid of this year! from look of things i think invstors are aligning with coins with reasonable utilities and the way meme projects are beginning to disappear and getting delisted from exchanges, only those ones that clearly have transparency and usefulness will survive this terrible cycle.

I think there are just few that we all know that survived,  but those meme coins are very early in the game, those like in the tap 2 earn niche. But after that hype, everything died down as well and so those projects who follow the trail didn't succeed.

And it's obvious that's what it was called meme coins. No use case whatsoever, it's just a way for developers and so called investors to make a lot of money from it. After that rinse and repeat. But not this year perhaps investors are tired of meme coins already.

[taufik123]

-snip-
I have always thought memecoins are sometimes used for people to gamble their money, believing they will become rich over night.

Yes that's always been the case, seeing how Memecoin is so FOMO when pumpfun gets so crazy and out of control,
many people risk their lives to sell their memecoins or even some people keep buying more memecoins so they can get rich instantly.

It became the pinnacle of the memecoin craze and I saw more and more scammers continuing to create memecoins to drain all the liquidity in crypto, enriching themselves with more memecoins.

[john_egbert]

-snip-
I have always thought memecoins are sometimes used for people to gamble their money, believing they will become rich over night.

Yes that's always been the case, seeing how Memecoin is so FOMO when pumpfun gets so crazy and out of control,
many people risk their lives to sell their memecoins or even some people keep buying more memecoins so they can get rich instantly.

It became the pinnacle of the memecoin craze and I saw more and more scammers continuing to create memecoins to drain all the liquidity in crypto, enriching themselves with more memecoins.

Memes are the bane of any deposit you did beforehand.

It's a roulette and usually it ends even before starting the initial roll onto the exchanges, on DEXes and such.

[MArsland]

If they had no "real" value to begin with, should be rather look for reasons on why they were pumped in the first place?

And when people talk about "real" or "real world" use cases, they seem to be just copy paste meta use cases for crypto economy that already existed. It's just more snake oil then substance.

And when it comes to "Synthetic assets", they are just overhyped pegged tokens masquerading behind terms like "RWA". Stocks are actual RWA, synthetics are just poor shadows of them.

The main factor in the failure of Meme coin is because from the beginning they did not want to create a product but just played hype with manipulation. Automatically investors and traders are now very aware that they will not always find profits because the title is gambling. There is no meme coin that really survives, even if there are still investors and traders who survive it's just a matter of waiting for time to realize how unnecessary it is to put money into shitcoin.

[LouVandetta]

Most memecoins doesn't have a real use case or utility. They are just a meme, for fun. People buys them only because something happened related to the ticker.
I mean sure meme can give you tons of profits in a blink of an eye but it can also rug you in a hearth beat. Not a good way to invest your money.
Most of them failed to held their price after a while.

[Accardo]

Most memecoins doesn't have a real use case or utility. They are just a meme, for fun. People buys them only because something happened related to the ticker.
I mean sure meme can give you tons of profits in a blink of an eye but it can also rug you in a hearth beat. Not a good way to invest your money.
Most of them failed to held their price after a while.

Surprising to find out multiple crypto newbies lurking around memecoins with great hopes of gaining long run profits. Forgetting the 'meme' behind the coin shows how slow these users comprehend the nature of crypto, it's a straight up message for investors to understand that the emergency profits people get through such coins don't stay for too long before it disappears.

[allfriends88]

In short, the fallout is a mix of market‑wide crashes, high‑profile scams, tightening regulation, and a growing demand for substance over hype. If a meme coin can adapt add utility, improve transparency, maybe even get a regulated listing like BONK’s Swiss ETP it might survive the shake‑out. Otherwise, it’s likely to join the graveyard of the millions that never made it past the meme stage.

A few years ago, I actively bought meme coins, even though I realized they were completely worthless and just following the trend. I didn't make any profits, and I exited the meme coin market after realizing how risky it was. I believed there would never be a solid foundation for realizing meme coins in the future if the system remained the same.