A memecoin is a crypto token whose value comes from attention rather than from a product, a cash flow or a protocol. It has a name, a picture and a community, and its price is whatever the next buyer pays. That is the whole definition, and it explains the rest of this lesson: a memecoin's price is a measure of how many people are looking at it right now, not a measure of anything it does.
Almost all new memecoins launch on Solana, and most of those launch on pump.fun. A Carnegie Mellon and EPFL study counted 15,245,966 coins created there between 14 January 2024 and 14 January 2026 - a median of 17,926 new coins a day, with a record of 71,735 in one day. That paper is a preprint from September 2026 and has not been peer reviewed yet.
pump.fun works in three stages. Creation: anyone types a name and a ticker and uploads an image. pump.fun mints one billion tokens and places them in a bonding curve - a pool that sets the price by formula, with no order book and no seller on the other side. Every purchase pushes the price up the curve; every sale pushes it down. Graduation: when enough has been bought in (roughly 85 SOL for SOL-priced coins), the coin graduates to an ordinary liquidity pool on PumpSwap. In the study's data, 1.02% of coins got this far. After graduation: the coin trades like any other pooled token, with the price set by what the pool holds.
Here is what pump.fun charges, from its own fee page as last updated 20 May 2026. On the bonding curve: 1.25% per trade, split 0.95% to pump.fun and 0.30% to the coin's creator. On PumpSwap, the smallest coins pay 1.25% (0.93% protocol, 0.02% liquidity providers, 0.30% creator); the largest pay 0.30% (0.05% protocol, 0.20% liquidity providers, 0.05% creator). That fee is charged on the buy and again on the sell.
The same study measured what an open door like this lets in. At least 1.5 million coins - about 10% of everything created - were copies of an existing coin. 23.5% of coins appeared shortly after a post on Twitter or Truth Social. The most active 1% of creator groups, traced by who funded the wallets, made between 53% and 58.6% of all coins. 17% of trades by count were wash trades (the same party on both sides); by volume that was only 1.32%, which means wash trading inflates a coin's apparent activity far more than its apparent money.
98.98% of coins never graduate. That number is the floor under everything else in this course.
Every meme coin on our partner exchanges, measured and graded, is on the memecoin desk — one page per coin, losers included. Or put numbers on your own trades with the fee calculator.