Memecoins aren’t dead — they’ve just hit a rough patch and will come back in a different form, MoonPay president Keith A. Grossman argues. Far from a fad, Grossman says the core innovation of memecoins was demonstrating how easily and cheaply attention can be tokenized on blockchains — potentially democratizing the attention economy — even if the initial wave failed to return value to everyday participants. Grossman likens pundits’ declarations of memecoin “death” to early predictions that social media was finished after first-generation platforms stumbled in the 2000s. In both cases, he suggests, the idea was sound but the first implementations concentrated value in centralized hands and didn’t benefit communities. A later, better-executed wave could revive the concept. What happened: boom, then bust - 2024 boom: Memecoins were among the best-performing crypto sectors and the top narrative for crypto investors, according to CoinGecko. - 2025 crash: The memecoin market collapsed in Q1 2025 after several high-profile token failures and sharp drawdowns described by many as rug pulls. Criticism that memecoins and other social tokens had no intrinsic value accelerated investor flight. - High-profile examples: - A memecoin tied to U.S. President Donald Trump launched ahead of the January 2025 inauguration, peaking around $75 before plunging more than 90% to roughly $5.42, per CoinMarketCap. - Argentine President Javier Milei publicly backed a social token called Libra in February; the token later crashed, leaving an estimated 86% of LIBRA holders with realized losses of $1,000 or more. LIBRA had reached a peak market cap of about $107 million and was widely labeled a rug pull. The fallout prompted a government probe, investor lawsuits and calls for impeachment. Scrutiny has also hit other high-profile memecoins and launches — for example, transparency questions around token distributions (such as allegations that 30% of PEPE’s genesis supply was bundled) continue to fuel skepticism. What’s next Grossman’s take: the underlying thesis — that attention is a tokenizable asset — remains valid. The challenge is building token economies that return real value to participants rather than letting rewards be captured by centralized intermediaries. If that happens, memecoins (or their evolved descendants) could re-emerge — this time with more sustainable structures and clearer value propositions. Bottom line: 2024’s memecoin surge showed the potential; 2025’s collapses exposed structural flaws. Whether memecoins recover will depend on better token economics, greater transparency and mechanisms that actually distribute attention-derived value to communities. Read more AI-generated news on: undefined/news