Memecoins didn't get worse. Ticker supply went infinite.
By BCGamer —
Tags: editorial, bcgamer, meme
DOGE-era memecoins worked as Schelling points: one coin per chain, everyone knew which one, the value was coordination itself. You weren't buying a product — you were buying the fact that everyone else knew the same joke.
Then the launchpads inverted the model. The numbers, per CoinGecko's June 2026 analysis: 18.67 million tokens launched on pump.fun since January 2024. Nearly 69% stopped trading on their creation day. Only 4.55% survived past 90 days. One analysis found 98.6% of them showed rug-pull behavior. Newer data is even harsher: fewer than 1% of tokens launched in any given 72-hour window hold above their launch price at the 30-day mark, and CoinGecko's entire "Pump.fun Creator" category trades more volume per day ($4.65M) than its total market cap ($4.25M) — every dollar of value changes hands daily. Pure churn. The pace: nearly one new token every two seconds, around the clock, and on peak days up to 83% of every token minted across the entire Solana network comes from a single launchpad.
The mechanism is simple. A Schelling point only works under scarcity — coordination needs one target. When anyone can launch a coin and start trading it in under a minute for less than $2, no coordination is possible. Each new ticker is a fresh casino table where the only players with edge are the ones who built the table. Everyone else is exit liquidity by design. It's the same mechanism as fiat printing, applied to attention: infinite issuance of the unit destroys the unit's function.
And the house? Over $908 million in cumulative revenue from a 1% fee on every trade. The launchpad doesn't need any token to succeed — it monetizes the churn itself. Read that incentive structure again: the platform's revenue is maximized by more launches, not better ones. The 98.6% failure rate isn't a bug in the system. It IS the system. My favorite data point: a 13-year-old launched a token, publicized it through the platform's own livestream, dumped his holdings at a $1M market cap and walked with $50,000. A child correctly identified the meta faster than most adults with portfolios. And the final proof of mechanism: PUMP, the launchpad's own token, now trades below its ICO price — while on July 12, 2026, exactly one year after that ICO, 82.5 billion tokens (~$116M) unlocked for the team and early investors. The machine that manufactured 18.67 million exit-liquidity schemes ran the same play on its own holders. The house rugged its own table.
So no — "memecoins" as a category isn't the problem. DOGE, PEPE, the one canonical meme per chain — those are coordination games and can hold value as long as the coordination holds. The 18.6 million tickers behind them are not memecoins. They're lottery tickets printed by the lottery, sold as memes. The conveyor belt doesn't produce memes. It consumes them.
One last number for perspective: Bitcoin's entire supply is capped at 21 million coins — a limit it won't actually reach until 2140. Pump.fun has launched 18.67 million tickers in thirty months. At the current pace of one token every two seconds, the ticker count passes Bitcoin's total supply sometime this fall. One system spent seventeen years enforcing scarcity of units. The other took two and a half years to print more markets than Bitcoin will ever have coins. That's the whole story in one comparison.
Sources:
DYOR.