The Number Nobody Talks About
Over 50,000 new tokens launch on Solana every day. By the end of that same day, over 95% of them are effectively dead — no trading volume, no holders, no reason to exist. Within a week, that number climbs above 99%.
Crypto Twitter shows you the winners. The 100x screenshots. The “I turned $50 into $5,000” posts. What you don’t see are the thousands of quiet $50 → $0 stories that happen in between. The survivorship bias in memecoin trading is extreme, and it creates a deeply distorted picture of reality.
This article isn’t about how to find the winners. It’s about understanding why the vast majority of tokens fail — because if you understand why things die, you get better at spotting the few that might live.
Reason 1: Nobody Actually Wanted the Token
This is the simplest and most common reason. Someone opened Pump.fun, typed in a name, uploaded a picture of a dog wearing a hat, and clicked “Create.” Thirty seconds of effort. Zero plan. Zero marketing. Zero community.
The token appears on the bonding curve. Maybe the creator buys a small amount to get it started. Maybe one or two random people buy a few dollars worth out of curiosity. Nobody else comes. The token sits there with 3 holders and $4 in the curve, slowly being forgotten.
There’s nothing malicious about this. Most token creators on Pump.fun aren’t scammers — they’re bored people experimenting with a platform that makes token creation free and instant. They create a token the same way someone might create a meme: for fun, with no expectation it’ll go anywhere. And it doesn’t.
This accounts for roughly 70-80% of all token deaths. Not rugs. Not scams. Just… indifference.
Reason 2: The Creator Designed It to Fail
Then there’s the 15-20% that were never meant to succeed. These are the purpose-built rug pulls.
The playbook is simple and effective:
- Create a token with an eye-catching name tied to something trending
- Buy a large amount from multiple wallets at the bottom of the bonding curve
- Post the token link in Telegram groups and Twitter replies to generate interest
- Wait for organic buyers to push the price up
- Dump everything, draining the bonding curve or liquidity pool
- Walk away with the profits, leaving holders with worthless tokens
The whole cycle takes 30 minutes to 2 hours. The creator nets anywhere from $100 to $10,000 depending on how much attention the token attracted. Then they do it again with a new token and a new name.
What makes these hard to distinguish from legitimate tokens early on? The price going up looks the same whether it’s organic demand or a creator buying from their own wallets. The chart doesn’t tell you who’s buying — it just shows green candles.
This is why on-chain safety data matters more than charts for new tokens. A safety check can tell you if mint authority is active (the creator can print tokens), if one cluster of wallets holds 40% of supply (likely the creator), and if liquidity is locked (can the creator pull it). Charts can’t tell you any of that.
Reason 3: The Hype Cycle Ran Its Course
Some tokens do everything right at the start. Real community. Real interest. Good safety profile. The chart looks healthy for the first few hours. Then… nothing. Interest fades. The Telegram goes quiet. Volume drops. Holders slowly sell and don’t get replaced by new buyers.
This is the memecoin attention economy at work. There are thousands of new tokens competing for a limited pool of trader attention every single day. Even a legitimately interesting token can get buried under the flood of new launches.
The lifecycle usually looks like this:
| Phase | Duration | What Happens |
|---|---|---|
| Launch hype | 0-2 hours | Initial buying, community excitement, price spike |
| First test | 2-6 hours | Early profit-taking, price corrects 30-50% |
| Decision point | 6-24 hours | Either new buyers arrive (token lives) or they don’t (token dies) |
| Slow bleed | 1-7 days | Remaining holders gradually sell, volume approaches zero |
| Dead | Day 7+ | Token exists on-chain but nobody trades it |
The “decision point” between hours 6-24 is where most tokens that didn’t get rugged ultimately fail. If new organic buying doesn’t materialize — if the token doesn’t reach a new audience, get picked up by bigger accounts, or develop some kind of staying power — gravity wins. The slow bleed begins.
Reason 4: Market Conditions Shifted
Sometimes a perfectly fine memecoin dies because the broader market turned against it. SOL drops 15% in a day? Every memecoin on Solana gets hammered. Bitcoin crashes? The entire memecoin sector gets obliterated because it’s the first thing people sell when they need to de-risk.
Memecoins are the highest-beta asset in crypto. When the market is bullish, they outperform everything. When the market turns bearish, they underperform everything — often going to near-zero even if the token itself had a healthy community.
This is less about the token failing and more about the environment. But the result is the same: your position goes to zero, and it doesn’t matter that the safety checks were clean and the community was real.
There’s no real defense against this except position sizing. If you’re only risking what you can afford to lose on each memecoin trade, a market-wide drawdown is painful but survivable. If you’re over-concentrated, it’s account-ending.
Reason 5: The Tokenomics Were Broken
Some tokens fail not because of scams or lack of interest, but because the token design itself creates unsustainable price dynamics.
Common examples:
- Extreme holder concentration. Three wallets hold 60% of the supply. The price can never sustain an uptrend because any rally gets sold into by whales. New buyers enter, whales sell, price drops, new buyers leave. Repeat until dead.
- No liquidity lock. The initial liquidity is there, but it’s not locked. A week in, the creator pulls 80% of the pool. Slippage becomes so extreme that nobody can trade, and the token dies of illiquidity.
- Tax tokens. Some tokens have built-in transaction taxes — 5%, 10%, even 20% on every buy and sell. These slowly drain value from holders to the creator’s wallet. Over time, the token’s effective value erodes faster than any price appreciation can offset.
All of these are detectable before you buy if you know what to look for. TokenRadar checks holder concentration and liquidity automatically. For tax tokens and more exotic mechanisms, deeper tools like RugCheck provide contract-level analysis.
What the 1% That Survive Have in Common
If 99% fail, what makes the 1% different? Looking at the memecoins that have actually lasted — the BONKs, the WIFs, the ones that went from nothing to real market caps — a few patterns emerge:
Community that exists outside the chart. Successful memecoins develop communities that create content, make memes, and talk about the token even when the price isn’t pumping. When the community only exists while the chart is green, the token is one red candle away from death.
Clean tokenomics from day one. Mint and freeze authority revoked. Liquidity locked. No single holder with outsized concentration. The boring safety stuff that most people skip checking. The tokens that survive tend to have clean foundations.
Multiple waves of discovery. Successful tokens don’t pump once and stabilize — they get discovered by successive waves of new buyers. First the degens, then crypto Twitter, then larger influencers, then mainstream crypto media. Each wave brings new capital and new holders.
Narrative that resonates beyond crypto. The biggest memecoins tap into something cultural — a meme format, a shared joke, a moment. Pure “MOON ROCKET 1000X” tokens die because they have no identity. Tokens with genuine cultural resonance stick around because people enjoy the meme independent of the price.
Lucky timing. Let’s be honest — luck plays a huge role. Two identical tokens can launch on the same day, and one goes viral while the other dies at 12 holders. Being in the right narrative at the right moment matters more than any technical analysis.
What This Means for How You Trade
Knowing that 99% of tokens fail doesn’t mean you shouldn’t trade memecoins. It means you should trade them with eyes wide open about the odds.
Expect most trades to lose. If you go in expecting every token to win, you’ll be emotionally destroyed by the reality. If you go in expecting 7 out of 10 trades to lose, you can build a system where the 3 winners more than cover the 7 losers. It’s a numbers game, not a conviction game.
Safety checks are your first filter. You can’t control which tokens go viral. But you can eliminate the ones that are structurally designed to fail. A 5-minute safety check removes the rug pulls, the honeypots, and the broken tokenomics — improving your odds from “99% fail” to maybe “90% fail.” That’s a massive improvement in expected value.
Small positions, many trades. Since you can’t predict which tokens will survive, spread your risk across many small bets. One position going to zero hurts less than nothing. One position doing a 10x makes your month. The math only works if no single trade can blow up your account.
Time is a filter. The longer a token has survived with maintained volume and growing holders, the more likely it is to continue surviving. A 24-hour-old token with 500 holders and sustained volume is a fundamentally better bet than a 5-minute-old token with 3 holders. TokenRadar’s Trending tab surfaces exactly these kinds of tokens — ones that have already proven some staying power.
The Uncomfortable Truth
Most memecoins go to zero because most memecoins should go to zero. They were created in seconds, with no purpose, no plan, and no reason for anyone to hold them. The ones that don’t go to zero are the exception, not the rule.
Understanding this isn’t pessimistic — it’s realistic. And realistic traders outperform optimistic traders in memecoin markets, because they build systems designed for a world where most things fail. They check the data. They size positions small. They cut losses fast. They let winners run. And they accept that they’ll be wrong most of the time.
The memecoin market rewards the disciplined and destroys the emotional. Pick which one you want to be.