Despite the speculative activity of late 2024 might have cooled down, the memecoin market is very much alive and well

Even though the speculative activity of late 2024 might have cooled down, the memecoin market is very much alive and well, according to on-chain data from the Solana ecosystem. In fact, Solana’s data suggest that the memecoin market is entering an almost serene trading phase, with the following three signs indicating this development:

1. Memecoin trading is becoming an activity in and of itself, not just a speculative path to some other crypto asset.

2. User behavior around memecoins is changing drastically—from predominantly dogecoin-style memes on Twitter to doge as an umbrella term for a whole new class of internet assets that are way too fun to value with any kind of seriousness.

3. The infrastructure around memecoins is evolving fast, and in some cases, unpredictably—mostly due to the memecoins themselves.

The most recent assessment finds that pump.fun, a top platform for launching and trading Solana-based memecoins, has driven an impressive $650 million in cumulative trading volume to date. April 2024 saw everyday trading volumes remain robust, with the average daily volume spanning from $1 million to $2.7 million—offering a nice little sub-narrative stabilization pattern that saw the average fall within the sweet spot of around $1.5-$2 million. Volume not collapsing is a good thing, considering the last real collapse of volume we saw was in 2022.

Yet the trading volume today is about half what it was in April. However, the activity in April was robust enough that it brought the first quarter of 2024 trading volume up to around 12% of the Solana TVL.

The Rise of PumpSwap and Platform-Driven Innovation

The success of pump.fun is complemented by the successful launch of PumpSwap, which has dramatically transformed the memecoin trading space. Currently, the platform attends to memecoin trading of between $300 million and $480 million daily, which comprises 9 to 19 of Solana’s total on-chain decentralized exchange (DEX) volume. Within the first month of its launch, PumpSwap generated approximately $25 million in platform trading fees, averaging between $100,000 and $240,000 daily.

These figures highlight a critical development: new platforms are not just boosting the size of memecoin trading but also presenting novel paths for monetization and new technical functionalities. This evolution is making the user experience better, attracting more liquidity into the ecosystem. As competition heats up, platforms like PumpSwap are expected to maintain a leading role through a combination of innovation and user-friendly upgrades.

Token issuance data provide further insight into the dynamics of this ecosystem. To date, around 9.7 million tokens have been created on pump.fun, with issuance in April fluctuating daily between 20,000 and 40,000 new tokens. Interestingly, only a small fraction—about 100 to 350 tokens daily—successfully achieve “graduate” status, or meet the criteria for broader exposure and liquidity. The graduation rate has been relatively stable in April, sitting between 0.4 and 0.8 percent.

The memecoin market is mostly made up of tokens that are temporary and that very few people—if any at all—take seriously. The few tokens that manage to attract any sort of real interest and investment are the ones I tend to think of as somewhat viable. Those are the tokens that I think of as potentially good enough to be in the collection of motivational posters touting the alleged virtues of cryptographic tokens.

User Behavior Signals a More Rational and Complex Market

The meme coin user base that once drove the activity into the mainstream is changing too. For pump.fun, daily active users were between 200,000 and 400,000 at the mainstream peak from December 2024 to February 2025. But wallets have been seen to be stable around 150,000 daily active users since then. So the meme coin user base is not growing, and is instead changing.

SOL On-chain Data Recovery and Memecoin Data Analysis— OKX Ventures (@OKX_Ventures) April 27, 2025

This decrease shows that the speculative nature of the field is not as intense as it was previously. However, we are engaging much more diversifiedly and in a more rational manner now. The way that the average user behaves seems very much randomized, which is what you would want in a well-functioning market. We also see that there are still some speculative manias happening, like what we see in the NFT space or with certain coins. But unlike in the past, when market-wide speculative surges happened, this time has seen the market function in a much calmer manner.

This behavioral shift indicates that the retail euphoria might have cooled but that a core