Interest in the crypto market is moving away from decentralized finance and toward meme tokens, signaling the start of a new meme super cycle.
The rise of memecoins
Memecoins are picking up momentum as interest in DeFi weakening. While actual usage of DeFi is clearly high, the activity surrounding memecoins still relies on some aspects of crypto finance, particularly stablecoin lending.
The recent shift toward memecoins seems to coincide with a decline in DeFi hype, and memecoins have taken the lead in crypto discussions, with mentions of a memecoin super cycle reaching peak levels.
Influencer Murad Mahmudov has emerged as a top figure in this space on X, further driving attention.
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Look at the Mindshare of Crypto sectors.
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Meme Coins 32%
AI coins 21%Note that Crypto "AI Coins" are also Memes. They're just topical memes as a category.
We don't… pic.twitter.com/qbm5pjPkpH— yourfriendSOMMI ❤️💛💚💙 (@yourfriendSOMMI) October 16, 2024
Right now memecoins hold over 32% of the conversation around cryptocurrencies, while artificial intelligence accounts for nearly 22%.
Even some altcoin narratives are acting like memecoins, lacking real utility but generating expectations for positive price movements. Newer memecoins are outpacing previous ones.
Interestingly, Dogecoin hasn’t seen any significant change in sentiment and hasn’t led or followed the current meme hype.
Meme market, good joke?
Some assets have experienced very nice short-term growth in their social media presence, such as the GOAT token, which gained popularity after being promoted by an X account who is actually a language model trained on internet slang.
Searches for memecoins also surged since early October, recovering from a period of low interest on Google.
The meme narrative has grown beyond several other token trends in 2024, including serious use cases like real-world asset tokenization and Web3 gaming.
While these narratives could lead to bigger adoption and challenge existing industries, memecoins have become the most popular way to attract new users to the market.
This rise follows a year when launching an altcoin market failed to gain traction, resulting in a decline of the altcoin season index to just 22 points.
This suggests that Bitcoin remains the primary focus along with newly launched, affordable, but highly speculative memecoins.
Money talks
The memecoin market is currently expanding again, surpassing $55 billion in total value locked and showing consistent growth over the past week.
It reached an all-time high valuation of $89 billion in early 2022, largely driven by DOGE.
By late 2024, the market changed big time, with eight token projects now holding market caps above $1 billion.
Interestingly, memes that focus on community and lack rationality are outperforming projects that want to provide utility or various DeFi products.
Early projects like Shiba Inu created entire ecosystems with their own networks, yet attention is now shifting to newer tokens that can quickly transform investment portfolios.
