Most Memecoins Go to Near Zero. Here's How Long They Actually Last, Based on the Data
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5 min read
Say 100 new memecoins launch this morning. By tomorrow night, about 80 of them have stopped trading. After three months, about 5 are still going.
Those are not made-up numbers. They come from CoinGecko, one of the biggest crypto data sites, which counted what happened to millions of memecoins. This post shows the data, what it covers, and what it does not.
How long do memecoins last? On the platform CoinGecko studied, most do not last a single day.
A memecoin is a crypto token built around a joke, a mascot or a trend. Dogecoin is the famous one. It has no business behind it. Its price moves on attention.
Today anyone can make a new memecoin in minutes. A site called Pump.fun, which runs on the Solana blockchain, lets a person launch a token for almost nothing. Thousands launch every day.
That is why the numbers below are so large. Cheap launches mean a huge crowd of tokens, and most of them fade fast.
CoinGecko looked at about 18.67 million token launches on Pump.fun. The window ran from 14 January 2024 to 18 June 2026. Here is what it found, as reported by news outlets summarising the study:
| What happened | Tokens | Share of all launches |
|---|---|---|
| Last trade came on the same day as launch | 12.8 million | 68.67% |
| Stopped by the end of day two (day zero or one) | 14.99 million | 80.37% |
| Still trading after 90 days | 850,180 | 4.55% |
Read it slowly. About 7 in 10 tokens had their final trade on the day they were born. About 8 in 10 were done within two days. Fewer than 1 in 20 were still going after three months.
We could not open the CoinGecko page directly from our systems, so we read these figures from several outlets that reported the study, including KuCoin News and crypto.news. They agree with each other. We retrieved them on 5 October 2026.
Let us shrink the data to 100 tokens so it is easy to picture. We simply scale the shares above. This is an illustration of the study's shares, not a prediction for any one token.
| After | Tokens that have stopped trading | Tokens still trading |
|---|---|---|
| Day zero (launch day) | about 69 | about 31 |
| Day one | about 80 | about 20 |
| Day 90 | about 95 | about 5 |
Notice what the table says about timing. The biggest drop is on the first day. After that the fading slows, but about 15 more of the 100 still stop trading between day two and day 90.
This is the part most headlines skip, so read it carefully.
CoinGecko measured the last trade on Pump.fun's own pricing system. A token that stops trading there is not always at a price of zero in every sense. And a token with no trades is not proof that every buyer lost everything.
CoinGecko also warns that the 4.55% survival figure may be too low. Some tokens move to other trading venues, such as Raydium, Meteora or PumpSwap, once they finish Pump.fun's first stage. Those tokens may keep trading, but the Pump.fun data would no longer count their trades.
So the honest reading is this: most new Pump.fun tokens fade almost at once. The exact share that ends up worth nothing is not in this dataset.
CoinGecko ran a wider study of its GeckoTerminal data. As of 31 December 2025, about 11.6 million of nearly 20.2 million tokens it had tracked were classed as dead, or 53.2%. Reports say 86.3% of those failures happened in 2025 alone, in the same period that easy launch tools spread.
"Dead" here means a token that is no longer actively traded. Only tokens with at least one trade were counted. We read these numbers from summaries by CoinDesk and others, because the original page was out of reach for us.
The lesson holds across both studies. When anyone can launch a token for free, most tokens do not last.
What about the big, well-known memecoins that did survive? They exist, and you can look at one. Dogecoin has a price history page on NetWort where you can see how far it has swung.
But a survivor does not tell you about the crowd. The famous coins are the few that remained out of a very large number of launches. This is called survivorship bias: you only hear about the winners because the losers disappeared.
You do not need a memecoin to follow it. But if you ever hold one, the data suggests a few plain checks:
Before you decide, look at the risk numbers. Open Explore on NetWort, then sort the crypto list by worst-case loss. This shows how deep each coin has dropped from its peak, so you can compare a memecoin against Bitcoin or Ethereum in one place.