Memecoins are not dead because the market is down and the story has faded, according to the president of payments infrastructure company MoonPay, Keith A. Grossman, who said that memecoins will return, but in a different form.
The true innovation of memecoin is that attention can be tokenized easily and at low cost through blockchain technology, democratizing access to the attention economy, Grossman he said. He continued:
“Before cryptocurrency, only platforms, brands and a small group of influencers could monetize attention. Everyone else created value and gave it away for free. Likes, trends, inside jokes and communities created enormous economic value.”
However, that value has not returned to participants and has mostly remained captured by large, centralized platforms, he added.
Grossman compared memecoin’s poor outlook among analysts to forecasts of the demise of social media after the first generation of social platforms failed in the early 2000s, before the rise of a later group of companies that turned the niche sector into a cultural phenomenon.
Memecoins were one of the top-performing crypto asset sectors in 2024 and were the year’s top narrative among crypto investors, according to crypto market data platform CoinGecko.
However, sharp criticism that memecoins and other social tokens have no value and several high-profile token implosions eventually caused the market to crater and investors to abandon the story.
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Presidential shenanigans and the decline of the memecoin sector
The memecoin market collapsed in the first quarter of 2025 after several high-profile token collapses and significant declines that were characterized as “carpet pulling”.
United States President Donald Trump launched memecoin ahead of his inauguration in January 2025, which peaked at $75 before falling more than 90% to around $5.42 at the time of writing, according to on CoinMarketCap.
Javier Milei, the president of Argentina, approved a social token called Libra in February, which also crashed, leaving 86% of LIBRA holders with realized losses of $1,000 or more.
The token reached a market capitalization of $107 million before the collapse, and the crypto community characterized it as a pullback.
Although Milei tried to distance himself from the token launch, a government investigation into Milei’s involvement was launched, culminating in lawsuits from retail investors and calls for the impeachment of Argentine lawmakers.
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