Are meme coins really over? An industry executive offers a different answer

In early 2025, the meme coin market experienced its "darkest hour." Trump-related meme coins fell from a peak of $75 to below $5.42, a decline of over 90%; the Libra token endorsed by Argentine President Milei also faced difficulties, with 86% of holders experiencing single-loss trades exceeding $1,000. According to CoinGecko data, the most prominent crypto asset categories of 2024 are now undergoing multiple significant price correction events.

Amid widespread pessimism, Keith Grossman, President of MoonPay, proposed an interesting perspective: meme coins are far from extinct, and their true value lies in representing a new economic mechanism—**low-cost tokenization of attention**.

**Why is this mechanism worth paying attention to?**

Grossman pointed out that before the advent of blockchain technology, only platform operators, brands, and top creators could monetize attention. Every like and trending topic created by ordinary users was quietly harvested by centralized platforms. The emergence of meme coins broke this monopoly—anyone could participate in creating value and sharing hotspots to earn economic rewards.

**Will history repeat itself?**

Interestingly, Grossman compares the current pessimism about meme coins to the mistakes made after the social media bubble burst in the early 2000s. At that time, many believed that new phenomena like blogs and Facebook were just fleeting trends, but ultimately they reshaped the entire information dissemination landscape.

Following this logic, meme coins may not revive in their original form, but the innovative mechanism behind them—democratized attention value capture—likely will continue to evolve in new forms. The recent sharp decline may simply be a necessary adjustment as the market searches for genuine application directions.