While remarkable developments continue to occur in the crypto market, the rise led by Bitcoin enables important steps to be taken. Accordingly, more than a million new tokens have been created in the crypto space since the beginning of April; More than 370,000 new tokens were launched on Ethereum, while more than 640,000 new tokens were launched on Solana, mostly #memecoin .
Memecoin Craze Stays on the Agenda
Since April 1, 372,642 new tokens have been launched on the Ethereum network, with 88% of them launched on Base, the Coinbase-backed Layer-2 network. The Layer-2 network has seen an explosion of activity caused by delegators flocking to the low-cost network to support new memecoin projects.
Coinbase director Conor Grogan referenced a similar figure in a post to X on May 14, stating that this was twice the number of tokens created on Ethereum between 2015 and 2023. According to L2beat, the total value locked (TVL) in Base has increased by approximately 630% since the beginning of 2024; The main reason for this was wider hype for memecoin projects. Meanwhile, according to data from analytics platform Step Finance, 643,227 new tokens were created in Solana in the same time period.
According to the Dune Analytics dashboard, which tracks the number of new tokens launched on Solana-based memecoin platform Pump fun, 466,914 of the total 643,000 new tokens launched on Solana were memecoin projects. CoinMarketCap lists the 500 newest tokens added to its platform in the last 30 days, mostly memecoin.
Discussions Continue
Crypto analysis platform CoinGecko now has a memecoin category that lists more than 600 tokens with a total market cap of $52.7 billion, almost half of Tether's market cap. Grogan's X post sparked a number of negative reactions from the crypto community, with many claiming that memecoin projects are a scourge on crypto values.
Other analysts and investors have labeled the surge in new memecoins as spam to collect sniper bots designed to automatically collect new memecoin projects in hopes of an exit. An investigation into the matter revealed that one in six new Base memecoin projects were created for fraud, and more than 90% had vulnerabilities.