Meme Tokens Resemble the Market Mood in February, When the ETF Launches and Buying Drove Bullish Expectations

Crypto posting on X is showing positive sentiment and content expansion. The mindshare recalls the mood in February when the ETF narrative led to the year’s peak rally.

Crypto posting on X showed positive sentiment and content expansion. The mindshare brought to mind the mood in February, when the ETF narrative led to the year’s peak rally. This time, the main narrative was the latest wave of meme tokens, including older assets that were accelerating after months of trading.

The main driver behind the sentiment was the new meme season, driven by activity on Solana and a handful of existing blue-chip tokens. The rush to buy the low-priced assets in hopes of 100X gains or more was helping the entire crypto market. Meme tokens were considered aligned with Bitcoin (BTC), with traders looking for community-driven assets, and not those launched by cabals.

CT sentiment reaching February levels.

Back then? Bitcoin ETF success.

Now? Meme season. pic.twitter.com/ppJB05XqVX

— Kaito AI 🌊 (@_kaitoai) October 25, 2024

In the last quarter of 2024, new meme tokens were all the rage. This time, the promotion came from a small shortlist of top influencers, instead of a paid selection of KOLs. Only a few X accounts had the biggest mindshare and were able to cause token rallies with a single tweet.

The top meme token influencers in this crypto cycle included Murad Mahmudov, Ansem, Him, and Dragos. Murad had the biggest mindshare, with the other three sharing the remaining influence equally.

The current selection of X accounts focused on a small list, mixing a few established tokens with big exchange listings, and one or two hot cult tokens. Some tokens were used for active trading and flipping, while others were bought up in the hope of becoming the next cult with dedicated holders that would delay taking profits.

Another player entered the influencer game – the expanding X account of Truth Terminal. Just about a week ago, the bot trained on Internet lore had only around 74K followers. Since then, the account was up to 204K followers.

Briefly, Truth Terminal even flipped Murad’s mindshare, pumping its own selection of memes. The only reason Truth Terminal was not a full influencer was its penchant for tweeting random musings.

Truth Terminal also became a tool for third parties, who competed in the replies to make the bot mention a specific word. Often, the word would be used to create a new batch of meme tokens. Those tokens would rally very fast, then crash, but still retain some of their initial liquidity, with the hope for future rallies. SCOOP, one such recently created token, appreciated by 2,000% in minutes. The advantage of AI meme tokens was they were built very quickly and adopted by traders in the trenches, with no time for cabals to control the supply.

Kaito AI also pointed out the last couple of weeks brought the AI agent season, where new bot accounts were spawning in place of KOLs and other social media engagement hooks.

Google searches for ‘meme token’ and ‘meme tokens’ had a small uptick this week, with a much more notable trend on YouTube searches.

Meme tokens outperformed at the end of the year

The meme token trend was still reflected on both Solana and Pump.fun. The meme token launch platform set up a daily record, with more than 36K tokens deployed on October 24. Solana also marked peak fees and bribes, as buyers scrambled to acquire new assets and trade the hottest tokens.

Memes were also the most dramatically outperforming class of digital tokens, gaining thousands of percent in a few months. Based on Murad Mahmudov’s list, 14 out of 20 top-performing assets in 2024 were memes. Memes often broke out of the pack, and the most recent gainers included POPCAT and MEW. The meme token market established its value at $57B, of which DOGE was valued at above $19B.

Crypto traders were also boosting volumes for newly launched tokens, as even the ones with a low market capitalization saw peak DEX volumes, boosting Solana’s earnings.

Binance was also getting more involved into the meme token frenzy, though cautiously listing a small selection of tokens on its perpetual futures market. The latest additions were GOAT and MOODENG, two of the more recent memes with a cult following.