According to the CEO of payments infrastructure company MoonPay, Keith A. Grossman, memecoins are not dead due to the market crash and the narrative that said memecoins will come back, but in a different form.
The real innovation of memecoins is that attention can be tokenized easily and at low cost using blockchain technology, democratizing access to the attention economy, Grossman he said. He continued:
“Before cryptocurrencies, only platforms, brands and a small group of influencers could earn attention. Everyone else generated value and gave it away for free. Likes, trends, jokes and communities created enormous economic value.”
However, he added, this value has not returned to participants and has largely been trapped by gigantic, centralized platforms.
Grossman compared analysts’ dire outlook on memecoin to predictions of the decline of social media after the failure of the first generation of social media platforms in the early 2000s, before the rise of a second group of companies that turned a niche sector into a cultural phenomenon.
According to cryptocurrency market data platform CoinGecko, memecoins were one of the best-performing crypto asset sectors in 2024 and were the most popular move this year among cryptocurrency investors.
Pointed though criticism that memecoins and other social tokens have no value, and that several high-profile token implosions ultimately caused the market to crash and investors moved away from the narrative.
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Presidential antics and the collapse of the memecoin sector
The memecoin market collapsed in the first quarter of 2025 following several high-profile token collapses and significant declines that were described as “rug-pulling.”
United States President Donald Trump launched memecoin before 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 to CoinMarketCap.
Javier Milei, the president of Argentina, in February approved a social token called Libra, which also crashed, leaving 86% of LIBRA holders with losses of $1,000 or more.
The token achieved a market capitalization of $107 million before its collapse and was characterized as a rug-pulling by the crypto community.
Although Milei attempted to distance itself from the token launch, a government investigation was launched into Milei’s involvement, culminating in lawsuits from retail investors and calls for impeachment from Argentine lawmakers.
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