Over One Million New Crypto Tokens Launched Since April, Dominated by Memecoins

Since the beginning of April, the cryptocurrency market has seen the creation of over one million new tokens, with a significant portion being memecoins, particularly on the Solana network.

During this period, Ethereum saw the launch of 372,642 new tokens, 88% of which appeared on Coinbase’s layer-2 blockchain, Base. This layer-2 network has experienced a surge in activity, largely due to the influx of developers and speculators creating low-cost memecoins, contributing to a notable increase in network usage.

Conor Grogan, a director at Coinbase, highlighted in a May 14 X post that the number of tokens launched on Base since April surpassed the total number created on Ethereum from 2015 through 2023, doubling the historical count.

Additionally, the Total Value Locked (TVL) on Base has skyrocketed by approximately 630% since the start of 2024, as per data from L2beat. This growth is primarily fueled by the ongoing enthusiasm for memecoins.

Meanwhile, Solana has become a hotspot for new token creations, with 643,227 new tokens recorded in the same timeframe, based on data from analytics platform Step Finance. Of these, 466,914 were identified as memecoins by a Dune Analytics dashboard monitoring Solana-based memecoin platform pump.fun.

Most of the 500 newest tokens listed on CoinMarketCap over the last 30 days are memecoins. CoinGecko has even introduced a memecoin category, featuring over 600 coins with a collective market capitalization of $52.7 billion—nearly half of Tether’s market cap.

Grogan’s post on X attracted considerable criticism from the crypto community, with many expressing concerns that memecoins undermine the sector’s values. One commenter described the proliferation of these coins as a “net negative,” citing the increase in scams and fraudulent schemes that divert funds from more legitimate crypto projects to scammers who convert the loot to fiat currency.

Others described the surge in new memecoins as a mechanism to “spam to farm sniper bots,” automated systems that purchase new memecoins hoping they will surge in value.

A Cointelegraph investigation in April revealed that one in six new Base memecoins was a scam, and over 90% exhibited vulnerabilities.

Despite the backlash, memecoins were reported by Cointelegraph in April as the most profitable crypto narrative in the first quarter of the year.