CashboardGlossary · Memecoins
What is a memecoin?
A memecoin is a token priced on jokes and attention, with little or no product or cash flow behind it, so it is worth whatever the next buyer pays.
How does a memecoin work?
Dogecoin started it. Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer made it in December 2013 as a joke about the altcoin craze, and it is still trading more than a decade later. Shiba Inu followed in 2020. On Solana, BONK (December 2022) and WIF (November 2023) showed a meme could carry a real on-chain market, and then launchpads turned the whole thing into a daily production line.
Since pump.fun opened in January 2024, anyone can create a token for little more than a network fee. Thousands appear every day. Most are dead within hours. A few catch a narrative, climb the trending lists, fill their bonding curve and graduate to a proper pool, and a tiny number end up worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
With no cash flow to anchor the price, the analysis comes down to liquidity and who holds the supply. Momentum does the rest. Creators abandon tokens, insiders and bots buy the first blocks, liquidity can leave in minutes, and losing most of the price in a day is ordinary.
Picture a made-up token named after a viral clip. It launches at 9 a.m., touches a $2 million market cap by noon and sits at $200,000 by evening as the early wallets sell. Anyone who bought near the noon top is down around 90 percent. The chart is a single spike, and that is the most common shape in the category.
Also called: meme coin, memecoins, meme token.
Where does a memecoin show up in Cashboard?
Launchpad radar watches that production line: how far each new LaunchLab curve has filled, and which tokens made it to graduation. On Base, Base launches follows the same flow from Clanker and Zora, with pool liquidity or a holder count next to each market cap. A cap on its own says little. Trending on-chain shows the pools GeckoTerminal lists as trending on the network you pick, with 1h and 24h moves, volume against liquidity and the buy and sell split. Token terminal shows GeckoTerminal's GT score and safety tags for one token at a time, but Cashboard adds no score of its own and nothing on the board tells you to buy.
Frequently asked questions
Why do most memecoins go to zero?
Because the demand was only ever attention. Once the early buyers sell and the crowd moves on to the next launch, nobody is left to buy, liquidity thins out and the price follows it down.
Where can you read more about memecoin?
Related terms
Last reviewed . Market data in Cashboard comes from the providers named on each widget and may be delayed. Nothing here is financial advice.