Memecoin Odds: What Happens to 18.67 Million Token Launches

Memecoins are usually discussed through examples: the token that went up a thousandfold, the trader who turned a small sum into a large one. Those stories are true and they are also a biased sample, because tokens that fail produce no charts worth screenshotting.

This article starts from the opposite end. Rather than describing what happens when a memecoin succeeds, it establishes how often that occurs, using measured data across millions of launches. The mechanics matter, and they are covered below, but the base rate is the part that determines whether any of the mechanics are worth acting on.

1. The measured base rate

Two independent studies of the largest memecoin launch platform give a consistent picture from different angles.

Long-horizon survival. CoinGecko analyzed 18.67 million tokens launched on Pump.fun between 14 January 2024 and 18 June 2026:

Short-horizon graduation. A survival analysis of 832,941 launches observed continuously between 8 May and 10 June 2026 measured how many completed the bonding curve, the step required to reach a full decentralized exchange listing. The pooled graduation rate was 0.198%, with a 95% confidence interval of 0.189% to 0.208%.

That is roughly one token in five hundred. The same paper notes this represents a decline of more than threefold from a 0.63% rate measured for an earlier period, meaning the odds have been getting worse rather than better.

Percentages are easy to read and easy to discount. The same CoinGecko figures, drawn one mark per token, are harder to argue with.

Reading Figure 1

Start with the red field, because it is the base case. Those 687 dots are tokens whose last trade happened on the day they were created. They occupy about two thirds of the grid, and that proportion is the answer to "what usually happens" — not a bad scenario, the normal one.

Then look at the green band, and note that it is barely one row. Those 46 dots are the tokens still trading after ninety days — a single line across a grid twenty-five rows deep. Now consider what section 7 below spells out: that thin band is almost the entire population of memecoins anyone ever hears about, because a token has to survive in order to generate a chart, a screenshot, or a story. The other 954 dots produce nothing shareable and are therefore invisible to you, no matter how closely you follow the space. Your impression of memecoins is formed from one row of this picture.

Note what the grid deliberately does not show. The 0.198% graduation rate comes from a different study over a different period, so it is not a subset of these dots and cannot be honestly drawn inside them. On this scale it would be about two dots out of the thousand — put differently, the green group here is the generous measure of success, and the stricter one is roughly twenty times smaller still.

The takeaway is to reason from the field, not from the dots you can name. Before evaluating any specific token, picture where it sits in this grid before you know anything about it. It is a red dot until proven otherwise, and the evidence required to move it is a good deal stronger than an interesting story.

What these numbers actually tell you

The two studies measure different things and agree on the conclusion. Graduation is a short-horizon milestone; ninety-day survival is a longer-horizon one. One says roughly 1 in 500 completes its launch curve, the other says fewer than 1 in 20 is still trading three months later. Neither figure leaves room for a strategy premised on typical outcomes.

Failure is the base case, not the tail. In most asset classes, describing an investment's risk means describing the distribution around a central expectation. Here the central expectation is total loss. Any analysis that treats loss as the downside scenario rather than as the modal outcome has the distribution inverted.

And the trend is unfavourable. A graduation rate falling threefold between measurement periods indicates that increasing launch volume is diluting attention faster than new participants arrive. More tokens competing for the same finite pool of buyers makes each one less likely to find them.

2. What failure actually looks like

The 68.67% figure deserves separate attention, because it changes what "risk" means in this context.

More than two thirds of all tokens launched recorded their final trade on their first day. They did not decline over weeks. They did not find a lower equilibrium. Trading simply stopped, permanently, within hours of creation.

What this actually tells you

The dominant risk is illiquidity, not volatility. A volatile asset can be exited at a bad price. An abandoned one cannot be exited at any price, because there is no counterparty. Position sizing based on how far something might fall is the wrong frame when the realistic failure mode is that the position becomes untradeable while nominally still worth something.

Stop losses do not function here. A stop is an instruction to sell at a price, which requires a buyer at that price. In a pool that has stopped trading, the order does not execute, it simply sits. The standard retail risk-management tool is unavailable in exactly the scenario it would be needed.

The displayed price is not a realizable price. A token with no trading volume still shows a last-traded price and therefore a notional portfolio value. That number is an artifact of the last transaction, not an estimate of what the position could be sold for. Treat any holding without recent two-sided volume as marked at zero until proven otherwise.

3. The lifecycle

The pattern is consistent enough to describe as a sequence. Describing it is not a method for trading it, and the stages are far more legible in hindsight than in progress.

The structurally important stage is the fifth. Distribution is not a market accident. It is the intended outcome for whoever accumulated in stage two, and every participant arriving at stage three or four is the counterparty to it.

4. The mechanics that make it possible

Three features of launch platforms combine to produce the pattern above.

Creation is free and instant. Launching a token requires no capital, no code, and no approval. When the cost of an attempt approaches zero, the rational strategy for a creator is many attempts rather than one good one, which is precisely why launch volume is measured in millions and why each token's share of available attention keeps falling.

Liquidity is thin and often one-sided. A newly launched token typically has a single small pool. Thin liquidity means small buys move price sharply upward, which produces the dramatic early charts, and it equally means modest selling collapses it. The same shallow depth that makes a pump look explosive makes the exit impossible.

Supply is concentrated at creation. Unlike an asset distributed through years of mining or trading, a new token's supply starts wherever the deployer decides. Concentrated holdings mean a small number of wallets can exit most of the float, which is the mechanism that ends most lifecycles. The contrast with a diffusely distributed asset is examined in how Dogecoin pumps are structured.

5. The social signal trap

The survival study measured something that looks, at first reading, like an edge. It is worth working through carefully, because the correct interpretation is close to the opposite of the obvious one.

Tokens advertising social channels graduated at substantially higher rates:

What this table actually tells you

A 17.4x lift on a catastrophic base is still catastrophic. This is the entire point. Multiplying the odds by seventeen sounds transformative and takes you from a 99.89% failure rate to a 98.1% one. The strongest observable predictor in a sample of over eight hundred thousand launches still leaves you losing roughly forty nine times out of fifty.

Relative improvement is the wrong unit when the base is this small. "Nearly nine times more likely" is a true statement about a change from 0.166% to 1.485%. Reported as a multiple it sounds like an edge. Reported as an absolute change it is a shift of about 1.3 percentage points, and the outcome remains overwhelmingly failure either way. This is the single most common way memecoin analysis misleads, and it is usually not deliberate.

The signal is also trivially gameable. Creating a Telegram channel costs nothing. Any predictor that is free to fabricate will be fabricated by exactly the actors with the most incentive to appear credible, which erodes whatever information it carried.

The honest conclusion from the best available data. The most rigorous study of the largest sample found that its strongest predictor still leaves a 98% failure rate. That is a finding about the absence of an actionable edge, not the presence of one.

6. Community coins and new-generation memecoins

Grouping every joke token together obscures a structural difference that determines what a failure looks like.

Neither column describes an asset with cash flow or a fundamental floor. The difference is not that one is sound and the other is not. It is that their failure modes differ by orders of magnitude in both speed and depth, and treating them as one category produces badly wrong position sizing in whichever direction the error runs.

7. Why your feed is the right tail

This is the mechanism that makes the base rate so hard to internalize even after reading it.

A token that dies on its first day produces nothing shareable. No chart, no gain to post, no story. A token that rises sharply produces all three. So the sample of memecoins any individual actually observes is drawn almost entirely from the fraction of a percent that succeeded.

The result is a systematic distortion. The measured distribution has a mode at total loss within twenty four hours. The observed distribution, as experienced through social media, appears to have a mode somewhere around a large gain, because the failures are structurally invisible.

The practical correction is to anchor on the measured figure rather than the observed one. Before evaluating any specific token, restate the base rate: roughly 1 in 500 completes its bonding curve, roughly 1 in 20 is still trading after ninety days, and roughly 2 in 3 never trade again after day one. Any particular token's story has to overcome that prior, and a compelling narrative is not evidence, because compelling narratives are what the losing 99% also had.

8. If you participate anyway

The remaining honest guidance is short. Check whether supply is concentrated in a few wallets before buying, since that determines whether one party can exit the float. Assume any social signal is manufactured, because it costs nothing to manufacture. Recognize that arriving at the stage where you heard about a token means the accumulation stage completed without you. And treat the absence of recent two-sided volume as the position being worth zero regardless of what a portfolio tracker displays.

9. Conclusion

The mechanics of memecoins are simple and the data about them is unusually good. Across 18.67 million launches on the largest platform, 68.67% never traded again after the day they were created and 4.55% were still trading after ninety days. Across 832,941 launches in a controlled observation window, 0.198% completed the bonding curve, a rate that had fallen more than threefold from an earlier measurement.

The lifecycle that produces those numbers is not mysterious. Creation is free, so attempts are effectively unlimited and each competes for a fixed pool of attention. Liquidity is thin, so early buying moves price dramatically and later selling collapses it. Supply is concentrated at creation, so a small number of wallets can and do exit most of the float into whoever arrived last.

The most useful finding is the one that looks most like an edge and is not. Tokens advertising social channels graduate at up to seventeen times the rate of those without, and that still corresponds to failing about forty nine times out of fifty. The best predictor available in the largest study leaves the outcome overwhelmingly unfavourable, which is a finding about the absence of an edge rather than the presence of one.

What makes this genuinely difficult is not that the information is unavailable. It is that the failures are invisible. Every memecoin anyone sees discussed is drawn from a fraction of a percent, while the mode of the real distribution is total loss within twenty four hours. Anchoring on the measured base rate rather than the observed one is the entire discipline, and it is considerably harder than it sounds.

Frequently asked questions

Sources and further reading

Empirical sources:

• CoinGecko Research — The average lifespan of Pump.fun memecoins
• arXiv 2607.02823 — Pump.fun graduation regime windows: survival analysis of 832,941 token launches

Related CoinBeaver articles:

• What actually moves crypto prices
• DOGE and the speculative playbook
• What is tokenomics
• Vesting schedules and token unlocks
• Crypto rug pulls explained
• Pump and dump schemes explained
• Why most crypto traders lose
• Crypto slippage explained

This article is educational and is not financial advice, and nothing in it should be read as encouragement to buy or trade memecoins. The statistics cited are from the studies named above, cover the specific platforms and windows those studies examined, and may not generalize to other platforms or later periods. No price levels or individual token returns are quoted. In Figure 1, the 687 and 46 groups are CoinGecko's reported 68.67% and 4.55% rounded to whole tokens per thousand; the middle group of 267 is the remainder implied by those two figures rather than a separately reported statistic. The graduation rate is deliberately not drawn, because it comes from a different study over a different window and is not a subset of the same sample. The measured base rate is that the overwhelming majority of these tokens result in total loss.