Meme Coin Trends, Tools, and New Narratives in 2024

The information provided in this article is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial, investment, or other professional advice.

Meme coins are dominating the 2024 bull market narrative. As such, this is Lever.io's second article on meme coins.

In the last article from Lever.io, we covered some meme coin history in the context of building Web3 applications, community, and other infrastructure.

Meme Coin Trading: Web3’s Biggest Attention Magnet

This article from Lever.io, will look at the staying power of memes in Web3 by examining a brief history of meme coins over a decade and the Web3 infrastructure that supports their trading on the market.

Welcome to Lever.io: Top Web3 Influencer MarketplaceLever.io

This article will cover recent trends in meme coin trading. We'll examine macro and micro-trends, categories of meme coins, and how this phenomenon fits into the new attention economy.

Lever.io is Web3's solution for onboarding new users through digital marketing, content marketing, and influencer marketing all in one hub. If your Web3 project's marketing needs a boost in visibility, we're here.

The Value of Stress Testing New Tech with Memes

Starting off, we should address a big question: What's the point of trading memecoins?

On the one hand, they generally aren't used for paying network gas fees (with DOGE and other meme tokens running on their own L1 being an exception) or voting on improvement proposals, and they also tend to speed run to zero dollars with haste.

The sheer volume of new meme coins launched every day means that thousands of tokens are recorded forever on blockchains only to be ignored for the rest of time. Look at this chart below, and try and explain why so many tokens would be launched in this short timeframe.

On the other hand, new technologies need to be stress-tested in tons of different ways before they go public. This is especially true when that technology serves as a value layer for the internet and hosts Web3 applications like decentralized finance (DeFi), which are responsible for billions of dollars in total value locked (TVL).

Let's hear about the value of meme coins from Twitter's most savage Mr. Ratio, the Bald Canadian Turk, and most recently, Compression Villain, Mert.

Mert Mumtaz, CEO of Helius (not Helium or Helios), recently talked about the stress-testing features of meme coins, which can be seen in the clip above. He stated in the interview that memecoins serve a very useful purpose:

It’s the best possible way of stress testing a network. They use a lot of high end infrastructure to do this, because there’s actually a lot of money on the line. As engineers, we then see little bugs in the network that are a result of this incredibly high activity [and] high volumes.

Remember when Apple released an iPhone that dropped calls if the user held the phone (checks notes) ...like a phone? That kind of screw-up isn't going to be okay when "serious markets" like Nasdaq eventually move onto Web3 rails and raise the stakes. Mert continued by saying:

I like to think of it [meme coin trading] as a really good stress test for when real assets and use cases are on chain. It's a low stakes way for improving the fundamental physics of the chain.

Generally, in Web2 engineering, you have to simulate all these fake tools and stuff to make sure your systems perform when the time comes, but this is a real test and gives us a lot of learnings.

So, it seems like meme coins serve as a utility for the future of Web3, after all. They're not just a fun way to participate in trading; meme coins are stress-testing multiple vectors of permissionless distributed networks.

Where Are All These New Meme Coins Coming From?

Currently, in 2024, the vast majority of meme coin trading occurs on Solana. Of course, billions of dollars worth of meme coin liquidity is trading on other chains, but no blockchain is birthing as many meme coins in a day as Solana, and that's partly due to a dApp called pump.fun.

How Does Pump.fun Work?

Unlike any application that came before it, pump.fun has developed what can be described as a non-stop meme coin factory. By opening the homepage, users are bombarded with tokens that flash across the screen, new token after new token, a visual feast of the activity brewing on the site.

Anyone can post a picture, description, and ticker for a pre-launch token. Then, the meme coin will automatically launch on the decentralized exchange (DEX) Raydium once it shores up enough liquidity from users who provide pre-launch funding.

As can be seen below, it only takes $12k worth of SOL for a token to launch on Raydium. Many of these tokens are immediately bought by bots sniping new tokens at launch, so users who provided early funding are apt to dump their allocations after making a few multiples in profits.

How Popular is Pump.fun?

Users have flocked to launch tokens on pump.fun, and nearly half the tokens launched on Solana nearing H2 2024 originate on pump.fun. As can be seen below, over 10k new tokens a day were launched through pump.fun through May and June.

Surprisingly, pump.fun earns higher fees on a weekly basis than MakerDAO, a "serious project" that has spearheaded development in decentralized stablecoins and RWAs (Real World Assets). As can be seen below, Raydium's fees earned place the DEX in DeFi's top ten by revenue, with a significant amount due to meme coin trading, as the next leading DEX on Solana, Orca, has deprecated their constant product market maker (CPMM / x*y=k) pools, which are fundamental for price discovery and launching new meme coins (concentrated liquidity market makers [CLMMs] abhor volatility).

Unsurprisingly, the thousands of tokens launched on pump.fun have a lifespan of only a few hours or days. A few standouts that have proven sticky with the meme coin market are mentioned later in this article.

Also unsurprisingly, the pump.fun model has been copied by several other projects, including DEX Screener. Moonshot, which does the same exact thing as pump.fun but with fewer flashing lights, has attracted thousands of new tokens with "moon" in their name since launching a few days before this was written.

User-Friendly Tools Have Made Meme Coin Trading Easier

The tools for launching meme coins have become democratized with dApps like pump.fun. In addition, sophisticated tools for trading meme coins have become more widely available through Telegram applications like BONKBot.

Another trading bot, Photon, makes it easier than ever for users to snipe new tokens as they're minted. Like BONKBot, Photon also provides protection against MEV (Maximal Extracted Value), which is a way that sophisticated, i.e., highly technical, traders can front-run trades.

Additionally, traders using these tools can identify new tokens, and then they can enter and exit positions automatically by setting parameters for trading.

BONKBot and Photon make it easier for any meme coin traders to automate and optimize their trading experience, meaning that the meme coin playing field has become much more competitive since the days of SHIB derivatives on Ethereum.

In the big leagues of traditional finance, bots are winning. The world's biggest market makers are no longer "trading by hand," and in DeFi, the average user now has access to similar tools used by the pros.

Token trackers like birdeye have also helped level the playing field for meme coin traders. Unlike other major token trackers such as CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap, birdeye provides immediate information about tokens as soon as they become tradeable, including details about holders and DEX liquidity.

One new tool that has just hit the market will definitely affect the way users trade memecoins, and that tool is blinks. Any meme coin project on Solana can provide a link to buy tokens on their Twitter page, so users don't have to copy a contract address and go to a DEX.

Blinks are extremely new, but it's clear that they will reduce a massive amount of friction for new users. Anyone interested in new meme coins can take positions supporting new meme coin communities directly from Twitter—wow.

What's the Meme Coin Meta in 2024?

We've looked at how the ways people launch and trade meme coins have changed dramatically in 2024. Now, let's look at the current meme coin meta and what meme coins users are trading.

Solana Meme Coins Gained Serious Traction in 2023

A few popular voices on Crypto Twitter have posited that meme coin trading has transformed into a market for "attention tokens," one where politics and celebrities have entered an arena once reserved for dogs (DOGE, SHIB, FLOKI) and food (YAM, TACO, SUSHI).

During late 2023 and early 2024, liquidity started pouring into Solana meme coins. BONK's massive rise grabbed the attention of Bloomberg, and this interaction on Crypto Twitter shed new light on meme coins traded on a Layer 1 where nearly anyone on the planet could afford gas fees for trading on a DEX.

The First Mention of "Attention Tokens"

In his reply, hauru calls meme coins "attention tokens." Note: This moniker mirrors the Web3-native browser Brave's Basic Attention Token (BAT), which is a token rewarded to users who pay attention to advertisements instead of blocking them—if you pay attention, you get rewards.

One of Crypto Twitter's most recent main characters, Ansem, points out that "attention token" might be "the best label" for meme tokens out there. As a side note, Ansem rose to the Crypto Twitter spotlight by calling Dog Wif Hat ($WIF) and a few other tokens before major breakouts.

Meme coins are gaining attention in places beyond Crypto Twitter, and it's not just DOGE that normies driving cabs are talking about. In the following clip, you can see Jim Cramer mentioning BONK to the head of the SEC, Gary Gensler, live on television.

Trending Meme Coins and Attention Tokens in 2024

Tens of thousands of meme coins are launched every day in 2024. The market caps for about 99.9% of these meme coins share the lifespan of a fart in the wind, but a few have gained enough support on social media to attract considerable attention and volume.

We'll start by mentioning celebrity meme coins, as they have drawn the most attention in recent times. While politicians blur the line between celebrity and public servant, politically related attention tokens will have their own section.

Of course, we also look at dogs, cats, food, and culture.

Celebrity Meme Coins Battle for Attention

During the last crypto cycle (bull run 2021), celebrities began launching their own NFT projects and disappearing after they collected their profits for selling memorabilia. The year 2024 has taken a turn for the weird with a few celebrities sticking around on the Crypto Twitter timeline.

• Caitlyn Jenner and $JENNER

As soon as the former Olympian Caitlyn Jenner announced the launch of her meme coin on Solana, drama began brewing on the timeline. The token was launched by a notorious serial rugger named Sahil, who owned most of the tokens and dumped them. $JENNER was launched again, but this time on Ethereum.

As the narrative around this token drew more attention and grew a life of its own, Jenner became an active "reply gal" on Crypto Twitter. She also ended up on a date with the Solana-aligned content creator, Jakey.

• Iggy Azalea and Mother Iggy ($MOTHER)

Shortly after the fiasco of $JENNER's first launch, Iggy Azalea launched her token, $MOTHER. The former rapper and Only Fans model launched her token through pump.fun and tweeted the contract address, disavowing all other clones.

This tweet thread covers a lot of what's been going on:

When Iggy changed her profile picture to a 1/1 special edition Mad Lads NFT and soon after joined a Twitter Spaces to talk about crypto, degens began plowing into $MOTHER positions.

Azalea, or Mother Iggy, then spoke at length in an interview with Threadguy. The video has received over one million impressions on Twitter, and countless threads and memes have dissected the interview.

Since $IGGY has launched, Azalea has kickstarted a cellular wireless company that accepts the token as payment. Unreal Mobile users can buy iPhones or pay for 5G service plans through Sphere Labs.

• Andrew Tate and Daddy Tate ($DADDY)

For a while, it looked like Andrew Tate was backing several different meme coins bearing his name, including $RNT (the N without a "hard R") and $TOPG. Eventually, Tate launched his own token using pump.fun, declaring $DADDY as the official Tate meme coin—while at the same time declaring a "war of attention" on $MOTHER.

It was discovered that one wallet owned the vast majority of the $DADDY token in circulation. That wallet was traced back to Andrew Tate.

Tate then drew massive attention to $DADDY by burning 40% of the supply.

While the paper value for this token burn was over $100 million, there was less than $3 million worth of liquidity that could be swapped out of the pool, so Tate did not, in fact, literally burn $110 million dollars.

• Jason Derulo and $JASON

Jason Derulo has also entered the chat, but he's been here before. Even ZachXBT has "lost track" of all the tokens Derulo has backed over the years.

Searching birdeye for $JASON also reveals a large list of spinoff tokens, which has become increasingly common for meme coins during this cycle. It boggles the mind, though, to see the 24h volume for random derivative meme coins hitting the million-dollar mark, and more than once.

• Lil Pump Pumps $LILPUMP

Rapper Lil Pump posted a picture of a Solana tattoo on his forehead. Many started calling this one of the year's biggest top signals, but no one can say that this artist isn't working hard for his bags.

Lil Pump transformed his Rolls Royce into a rolling meme coin advertisement, replete with a Phantom wallet hood and a QR code for buying the token.

What celebrity will start shilling meme coins next?

Election Year Attention Tokens (Politifi)

2024 is an election year in the United States, and meme coins have become a bizarre black mirror of prediction markets for November when Americans take to the polls. The overwhelming majority of political meme coins revolve around Donald Trump, who openly supported crypto during a gathering of NFT holders at his Palm Beach home.

At the time of writing, MAGA Hat ($MAGA), an apparent tribute to the famous red hat worn by Trump supporters, has a market cap near $150 million. There are just too many Trump derivative tokens to name here, but a few stand out.

One of these tokens was purportedly launched by Donald Trump's son, Barron, in collusion with Martin Shkreli.

• Barron Trump(?) and TrumpCoin

When TrumpCoin launched, it was a veritable mess trying to verify its provenance. Was the token launched by Barron or not?

Bets of $100 million were placed on whether or not Barron Trump had anything to do with $DJT.

• Tremp vs. Boden

In the wave of misspelled but recognizable name meme coins that have surfaced this year, Tremp vs. Boden has taken the vast majority of attention (besides $DJT controversy) in the politifi market.

Besides finding its way to one of DeFi's largest perp DEXs, $BODEN has also made an appearance on New York's streets. If there wasn't video evidence, who would have thought this was real.

boy's club Tokens (Pepe's Friends)

Once "just a comic book character" from Matt Furie's boy's club comics, Pepe the frog has been the main character of crypto for a long time. He's also been labeled the symbol of alt-right extremism online by mainstream media, but hey.

The $PEPE token, which launched during the depths of the latest crypto bear market, now sits at a $5 billion market cap. Joining Pepe, albeit on Coinbase's Ethereum Layer 2 Base, is his friend $BRETT, which currently holds a $1.5 billion market cap.

Lo and behold, boy's club fellow Land Wolf has two meme tokens backed by serious cash. On Solana, Land Wolf currently has around $150 million market cap. On Ethereum, its market cap is only around $60 million.

And, finally, ANDY ETH, AndyBlast, and Andy on SOL is the last of the boy's club boys to make the. Andy's meme coin trades on the Ethereum, Blast, and Solana ecosystems, joining other copycats of his three friends.

New Dog and Cat Memecoins

Crypto loves dogs, and Dog Wif Hat (WIF)—a dog wearing a hat—saw upwards of $4 billion worth of love at its height, a market cap that once flipped PEPE. Then, tokens started launching everything under the sun wif hat, though most have failed to gain much traction.

At the top of the pump.fun list of tokens sorted by market cap, we'll find a few celebrity tokens mentioned earlier in this article. However, dogs—and now cats—still rule the meme coin kennel.

Pump.fun's highest market cap token goes to michi, "the most memeable cat on the internet." The little fur ball has its own Michi Meme Maker for dressing up the cat in various memetic poses.

The top nine tokens by market cap that launched on pump.fun are either celebrities or animals, with four out of nine being dogs or cats. Elsewhere, on the Bitcoin network, dog memecoins have taken over in the form of Ordinals and Runes.

Ordinals and Runes are two recently devised features on the Bitcoin network that create unique tokens by inscribing data on new satoshis. DOG•GO•TO•THE•MOON (Runes) has a market cap of over half a billion dollars at the time of writing.

On the Ordinals side of the meme coin dogs on Bitcoin, $PUPS peaked at around $600 million in market cap. The token has faced a serious drawdown since spring, when it was a top trending token on Crypto Twitter.

Getting back to cats, POPCAT has been tearing up the charts as a meme coin based on a solid foundation of a pre-existing cat meme.

The cat, named Oatmeal, pops open its mouth when users click, and there's a leaderboard on the POPCAT site showing that over 50 million clicks have made this cat pop. The token, at the time of writing, sports a market cap of over half a billion dollars.

Yet another popular cat meme coin, $MANEKI, which is based on the arm-swinging lucky cat, has been trading with around $30 million in daily volume and over $80 million in market cap.

New Food Meme Coins

After dogs and cats, of course, comes food. Food has been one of the most enduring narratives in meme coin history, and here we have some honorable mentions in the current state of the market.

The food meme coin communities making the most noise on the Crypto Twitter timeline these days are backing Chinese liquor and Costco hot dogs. $MOUTAI, named after the luxury-priced baijiu liquor that will set you back over $100 a bottle (or $1.4 million at auction), has a community sponsoring that's going as far as sponsoring conferences.

Costco's hot dog and soda deal has been famously priced at $1.50 for decades, despite inflation, 9/11, and the death of Sol Price (yes, his real name), the Costco founder who demanded the hot dog sold at his warehouses would never be priced higher than a buck fifty.

The $COST community's goal is to get the meme coin to $1.50, which would put it at a market cap of a billion and a half dollars. While very far from reaching this goal, the memes for $COST keep coming.

One brave soul on Crypto Twitter has promised to eat a Costco hot dog every day until $COST reaches $1.50.

How Lever.io Can Boost Your Web3 Project

As meme coins continue to captivate the crypto community, it becomes crucial for Web3 projects to stand out in a crowded market. This is where Lever.io steps in.

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Whether you are launching a new meme coin, developing a DePIN application, or building the next big NFT project, Lever.io provides the tools and connections needed to amplify your message.

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Again: The information provided in this article is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial, investment, or other professional advice.