Are the dog days over?

Primer

Within our team, there is a general consensus that memecoins have emerged as a legitimate onchain use case. However, there are differing or uncertain views on the staying power and growth potential of the vertical as a whole.

While memecoins appear to be the dominant category in crypto in terms of popularity and mind share, they still represent a relatively small share of the total crypto market. The total market capitalization of memecoins is currently around 2%, down from 2024 highs of 2.67%, following a noticeable increase in market share from 1.09% in March 2024. Perhaps more importantly, this growth in share appears to be a resurgence in the existing memecoin use case, as opposed to the birth of a brand new vertical, with the current 2% share being well below the all-time high of 3.65% in May 2021.

While memecoins remain a small market in terms of total market capitalization, the vertical has been extremely successful in capturing volume share on a handful of blockchains. For example, we estimate that the Solana onchain volume share of memecoins has grown from approximately 35% to 65% in 2024. This sustained growth in volume share has been somewhat unique to Solana, with memecoin volume share on Base, which is typically seen as another hotbed for memecoins, falling from 46% to 33%. Meanwhile, volume breakdown on Ethereum L1 has remained relatively flat, with memecoin volume going from 15% to 14% in 2024.