Memecoins Are Never Coming Back

The fact that you’re probably not going to finish reading this newsletter kind of proves my point.

Every year, our attention gets sliced thinner.

More emails. More feeds. More notifications. More ways to gamble. More places screaming for your eyeballs at the exact same time.

Attention isn’t just scarce anymore, it’s fragmented.

That’s the part people miss when they talk about why memecoins used to work.

They didn’t just go up because they were funny or stupid or early. They worked because, by today’s standards, they held the stage for an unusually long time. There weren’t a thousand new distractions every week pulling capital and attention elsewhere.

That world is gone.

Heading into 2026, the competition for attention is brutal and memecoins are no longer the most exciting game in town.

Prediction markets are a perfect example. They exploded for the same core reason memecoins did: asymmetric upside. You can still 20x your money in weeks if you’re right.

But they’re more engaging. More interactive. And, frankly, safer than what memecoins have devolved into.

Today there are hundreds of thousands of memecoins. Most are blatant cash grabs. The rest are being traded by an increasingly small, insular group of participants, which is why you get these short, violent, blink-and-you-miss-it rallies like the one we saw last week.

That’s not a bull case. That’s a liquidity vacuum.

How are memecoins supposed to compete in a world where attention is more fragmented than ever, supply is infinite, and there are better, more compelling forms of speculation pulling people away?

I don’t see it.

Sure, one or two might still break through over the next few years. Something always does. But for every survivor, there will be millions quietly drifting to zero.

And here’s the good news.

This is actually healthy for crypto.

When attention gets harder to earn, only projects with real technology, real users, and real economic value can command it. Capital becomes more selective. Empty narratives fade.

What’s left are digital assets that actually do something: infrastructure, rails, systems that can reshape how finance, markets, and coordination work at a global scale.

That’s how crypto grows up.

And if you’re still reading this…

You’re already doing the one thing that matters most in the next phase of crypto: paying attention when almost everyone else can’t.

Louis Sykes
Senior Crypto Analyst, All Star Charts