The cryptocurrency market continues to be recycling previous narratives, with few new traits but to emerge and exchange the dominant themes in the primary quarter of 2025.
Artificial intelligence tokens and memecoins had been the dominant crypto narrative in the primary quarter of 2025, accounting for 62.8% of investor curiosity, in keeping with a quarterly analysis report by CoinGecko. AI tokens captured 35.7% of world investor curiosity, overtaking the 27.1% share of memecoins, which remained in second place.
Out of the highest 20 crypto narratives of the quarter, six had been memecoin classes whereas 5 had been AI-related.
“Looks like we’ve but to see one other new narrative emerge and we’re nonetheless following previous quarters’ traits,” mentioned Bobby Ong, the co-founder and chief working officer of CoinGecko, in an April 17 X post. “I suppose we’re all drained from the identical previous traits repeating themselves.”
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Curiosity in memecoins noticed a pointy enhance forward of US President Donald Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20 after his workforce launched the Official Trump (TRUMP) memecoin on Jan. 18 and the Official Melania (MELANIA) token on Jan. 19 on the Solana community.
Nonetheless, some trade watchers are involved that memecoins are draining capital from utility tokens, comparable to Solana (SOL), limiting their value potential.
SOL has fallen by round 48% in the previous three months since Trump’s inauguration, when it briefly peaked above $270, TradingView information reveals.
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Memecoins “fell off a cliff” after Libra fiasco
The crypto trade took one other hit after the collapse of the Libra (LIBRA) token, a memecoin endorsed by Argentine President Javier Milei, which worn out $4 billion in market worth inside hours after insiders allegedly withdrew over $107 million in liquidity, inflicting a 94% value crash.
Memecoins “fell off a cliff” after the Libra scandal because the variety of new tokens deployed on Solana’s Pump.enjoyable noticed a drastic fall, the report said, including:
“Each day tokens deployed has fallen by over 56.3% from its peak in January to 31K on the finish of 2025 Q1. The share of ‘graduated’ tokens additionally fell drastically to 0.7%, in comparison with 1.4% in 2025 January.”
Whereas the Libra scandal marked the top of the “politicam memecoin” development, the trade’s most worthwhile merchants are nonetheless attempting to find speculative memecoin investments regardless of the end of the memecoin supercycle.
“There was the current meme surge and good cash is at all times completely happy to capitulate on that,” Nicolai Sondergaard, a analysis analyst at Nansen, instructed Cointelegraph, including that memecoins might solely be a “enjoyable play” for good buyers, as they aren’t affected by the identical macroeconomic issues as Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH).
On the finish of March, a savvy dealer turned an preliminary funding of simply $2,000 into $43 million with the favored Pepe (PEPE) memecoin, however missed promoting the highest, locking in a realized revenue of over $10 million, regardless of Pepe’s over 70% decline.
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