Back to basics: some thoughts on the memecoin narrative

Author: The DeFi Investor Translation: Shan Ouba, Golden Finance

This year, altcoins have undoubtedly had a bad start. According to dexu.ai, no cryptocurrency narrative has achieved positive price performance since the beginning of 2025.

So why is the market down? Looking back, I think there are several reasons: 1. Trump’s inauguration became a “sell the news” event (all those who wanted to buy because Trump won actually bought long before the inauguration). 2. The rollout of the US Bitcoin Reserve has been slower than most people expected. 3. There is a lot of macroeconomic uncertainty right now. But perhaps the most important reason is: Thousands of low-investment meme coins have flooded the market in the past few months. Launch platforms like Pumpdotfun make it easy for anyone to launch a new coin. This is obviously not sustainable in the long run. In the previous bull market, we only had a few thousand tokens. Now, liquidity is spread across millions of different tokens. In the past 30 days alone, we’ve seen four major memecoin launches:

• $TRUMP — down 76% from its all-time high (ATH).

• $MELANIA — down 90% from its ATH.

• $CAR — down 95% from its ATH.

• $LIBRA — down 93% from its ATH.

Each of these coins reached multi-billion dollar market caps at their peaks.

While I have no problem with meme coins like DOGE or FARTCOIN, celebrity meme coins like the ones I mentioned are a negative for crypto as some insiders have made hundreds of millions of dollars off of retail investors. The launch of the $TRUMP coin has convinced many celebrities that insider trading is now legal.

Fortunately, I believe there is still hope.

One ​​thing that makes me optimistic is that DeFi has recently succeeded in subverting memes in narrative thinking for the first time.

According to Dexu.ai, memecoins are the fourth worst performing cryptocurrency narrative in the past 30 days.

Sentiment on X regarding memecoins also seems to have turned negative. More and more people are beginning to realize how celebrity memecoins are extracting wealth from retail investors.

On top of this, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has just announced a new cyber unit designed to combat fraud in areas such as cryptocurrency.

Hopefully this will end the criminal season where every celebrity launches a new shitcoin and then dumps it on their fans.

I still believe that there will be a lot of pro-crypto policy announcements in the coming months. But there is a big difference between encouraging innovation and tolerating scams. We need more innovation, not more celebrities defrauding their supporters.

I expect the season of usefulness will finally arrive as we finally start to get more regulatory clarity around crypto in the US and other major countries.

Crypto is not going away.

It’s true that the last few months have been tough, but we’ve been through worse times.