How Many Meme Coins Are Created Every Day? (2026)

How many meme coins are created every day? Around 25,000 on Solana's largest launchpad alone, and 20,000 to 45,000 across the chain depending on the week. We did not take that from a headline. On 4 September 2026 we paginated pump.fun's public coin listing, deduped it by mint address, and counted 630 new tokens created between 16:44 and 17:19 UTC — a 35.02-minute window, 17.99 launches per minute, one every 3.3 seconds. Extrapolated, that is 1,079 an hour and 25,908 a day.

Those 630 tokens came from 377 distinct creator wallets. Not bots farming one address: 295 separate wallets minted exactly one coin each and were never seen again in the window.

That is the fact worth sitting with before anything else. The barrier to creating a token on Solana has fallen so far that launching one is now closer to posting than to founding. What follows is the full census — the rate, who is behind it, how much money the cohort actually earns, and the far smaller number that says how many of them get anywhere.

Disclosure: we build Alchemii, a direct-launch Solana token creator, so we compete with bonding-curve launchpads for the same launches. Every number below is either measured from a public endpoint you can hit yourself or cited to a source with its window stated.

Quick Facts

How many meme coins are created every day, measured rather than estimated

Most articles answering this question cite one another. Here is the method instead, so the number is checkable.

The pump.fun frontend exposes a public coin listing that accepts sort=created_timestamp&order=DESC. Paginate it, dedupe by mint address, sort by creation time, and you have a census of everything minted in the last half hour. We ran it twice on 2026-09-04: once returning 420 unique mints across 24.73 minutes, once returning 630 across 35.02 minutes. The two pulls give 16.98 and 17.99 launches per minute — a 6% spread, which is the honest error bar on any daily figure derived from a short window.

Two things about that table are worth flagging. First, the yearly figure is a pace, not a forecast; launch volume swings hard with market conditions and with whatever incentive the platform shipped last week. Second, it counts one venue. DefiLlama tracks 45 protocols in Solana's Launchpad category, and pump.fun accounted for $47.88M of their $54.53M in combined 30-day fees — 87.8%, dominant but not the whole market.

Cross-checking the count: four sources, four different numbers

A single 35-minute window is a thin reed. So here is our figure against three independent counts taken at different times by people with no interest in our answer.

The spread is instructive rather than embarrassing. Marino et al. parsed 655,770 tokens created on pump.fun between 1 September and 1 October 2025 straight from Solana — 21,859 a day. The Block reported nearly 30,000 launches on 7 January 2026, a single-day record at the time. Cryptobriefing counted more than 313,000 tokens in the week to 31 August 2026 across all Solana launchpads, the highest weekly total in roughly 19 months, which annualises to 44,714 a day but describes an exceptional week rather than a baseline.

Read together: the floor is about 20,000 meme coin launches per day and the ceiling in a hot week is roughly double that. Our measurement lands in the middle of two years of independent data, which is the most that can be asked of a half-hour sample.

Who is creating all these meme coins?

This is where the "everyone is launching a token" impression turns out to be literally true rather than a figure of speech.

Nearly four in five creator wallets in the window appear exactly once. That long tail — 295 wallets, 295 tokens, 46.8% of all launches — is the crowd: people trying it once, on a whim or after seeing someone else's chart. Marino et al. saw the same shape at scale, counting 243,123 distinct creator addresses behind a single month of launches.

The other tail is industrial. Seven wallets minted ten or more tokens each inside 35 minutes, producing 17.8% of everything launched, and the busiest minted 24 tokens in 35 minutes — one every 88 seconds, which is faster than a human can write a description. That is a spray-and-pray strategy: mint constantly, cost per attempt near zero, hope one catches.

Both tails matter if you are considering your own launch, for opposite reasons. The one-shot crowd is why the field looks impossibly crowded. The spam wallets are why it mostly is not: a token minted every 88 seconds has no name worth reading, no image worth clicking and no story. It occupies a row in a feed. It does not occupy a competitor's position.

Do meme coin creators make money? $11.31M in one month says yes

Here is the number that makes people open a token creator in the first place, and it is real.

DefiLlama tracks what it calls supply-side revenue for pump.fun — defined in its own methodology as "creator fees paid out to coin creators and cashback returned to traders/holders of the coin." In August 2026 that figure was $11,314,863: the largest month on record, ahead of January 2026's $10.03M and more than five times August 2025's $2.14M. All time, the platform has routed $96,355,495 to creators. On the day we measured, $311,237 flowed out in 24 hours. Across all Solana launchpads, creator payouts totalled $12,994,927 over 30 days.

The mechanism is straightforward: pump.fun charges 1.25% on every bonding-curve trade, split 0.300% to the coin's creator and 0.95% to the protocol, per its published fee page. Creating the coin costs 0 SOL. After graduation, the canonical PumpSwap pool is tiered by market cap — 1.25% total at the bottom, falling to 0.300% at the top — and the creator's slice shrinks as the coin grows, from about 1.00% down to 0.05%.

So the pool of money is genuine, growing, and at an all-time monthly high. That is the honest bull case for launching, and if you want the full mechanics of every income path — creator fees, LP fee share, disclosed allocation — we broke them down in how meme coin creators make money.

Now the distribution.

Why the median launch earns nothing

Averages are useless here. $311,237 a day divided by 25,908 launches gives $12 per token, and that number describes precisely zero tokens.

The median new token in our sample had a market cap of 27.959 SOL. A billion tokens priced against pump.fun's 30 virtual SOL / 1.073B virtual token initialisation comes to exactly 27.96 SOL — so the median token sat at the curve's starting value, untouched, with no net buying at all. (That match is also a clean independent confirmation of the curve constants we published in our pump.fun mechanics explainer.)

Flip the chart above to its second view and the concentration is just as sharp. Across all 630 curves there was 280.9 SOL of real liquidity, about $28,568 — and five tokens held 52.3% of it, twenty held 80.1%, and the remaining 610 shared $5,685 between them. Creator fees are a percentage of trading volume, so that split is also the shape of who earned anything at all.

Here is the same finding from the other end — what the typical new meme coin actually looked like 35 minutes after minting:

This is the part the launch-volume number hides. 25,908 launches a day is not 25,908 competitors. It is a few hundred real attempts wrapped in a very large amount of noise, and the noise is what makes the odds look worse than they are. The published survival data agrees on direction: CoinGecko found 68.67% of the 18.67 million pump.fun tokens ever traded logged their last trade on the same day they were created, and only 4.55% survived past 90 days. We wrote up the anatomy of that in why most Solana memecoins die in 24 hours.

Where you launch decides what you keep

If you are going to be one of the 25,908, the venue decision changes your economics permanently, and it is the one decision that is fully yours before anyone else is involved.

The trade-off in plain terms. A bonding curve costs nothing upfront and requires no liquidity from you — the platform handles price discovery, and in exchange takes 0.95% of every buy and every sell on the curve while handing you 0.300%, then keeps a protocol slice of every trade in the graduated pool as well. A direct mint costs a flat fee once, requires you to fund your own pool, and takes nothing from your volume at any point. On a 2.5% round trip, a 0.32 SOL flat fee is overtaken by curve fees at roughly 13 SOL of cumulative trading volume — a threshold any coin that works at all clears in its first hour.

The second difference is control, and it does not show up in a fee table. On the curve you cannot set supply, decimals, or fee tier, you cannot revoke authorities on your own schedule, and the liquidity is never yours to burn — which means the single loudest trust signal a memecoin can produce is not available to you until the protocol decides it is. Mint directly — through the Solana meme coin creator, or any tool that does the same job — and the authority state is settled in the same transaction that creates the token.

Is it too late to launch a meme coin in 2026?

Not for the reason people ask. The question usually means is the space too crowded, and the census above answers that: the space is enormous, and almost none of it is trying.

That third row is the most useful number in this article. In a survival analysis of 832,941 launches, only 2.4% listed a Telegram — and those that did graduated at 1.485% versus 0.166% for those that did not, roughly a nine-fold difference. Treat it as directional rather than causal: a team that sets up a Telegram differs from one that does not in a dozen ways. But the base rate is the striking part, and it is free to clear.

So the honest answer to is it too late: launching has never been cheaper, faster, or more crowded, and none of those three facts is the one that decides your outcome. Attention decides it. The marketing side of a launch is where the work actually lives, the launch checklist is the order to do it in, and the mint itself is a five-minute form at create a meme coin.

Limitations

• A 35-minute window is a snapshot. Launch rates swing with market conditions and platform incentives. Two pulls an hour apart differed by 6%; a pull during a quiet Sunday or a viral Tuesday would differ by far more.
• We measured one launchpad. pump.fun is 87.8% of Solana launchpad fees, not 100% of launches. The chain-wide number is higher and we did not measure it independently.
• The listing may filter. We requested NSFW inclusion, but we cannot rule out that pump.fun's public listing omits banned or flagged mints, which would make our rate a floor rather than a ceiling.
• Outcomes were read minutes after minting. A token 12 minutes old has not finished its story. The median graduation takes 4.4 minutes, so most sorting has happened — but the 1.11% figure is a 35-minute read, not a lifetime graduation rate.
• Creator payouts include trader cashback. DefiLlama's supply-side figure bundles creator fees with cashback returned to traders, so $11.31M is an upper bound on what reached creators, not a pure creator total.
• Curve state can move backwards. A minority of sampled curves read below their initial reserves, which pump.fun's newer "Mayhem" mode may explain. We did not model it and excluded it from every claim.
• Dollar figures decay. They are one SOL price from one timestamp ($101.70, 2026-09-04). The SOL amounts are the durable part.
• Out of scope: post-graduation price behaviour, buying meme coins, and whether any specific token is a rug. Those live in is pump.fun safe and memecoin FOMO.

FAQ

How many meme coins are created every day?

About 20,000 to 45,000, depending on the week and how many venues you count. Our direct measurement on 2026-09-04 put pump.fun alone at 17.99 launches per minute — 25,908 a day. Researchers counted 655,770 pump.fun tokens across September 2025 (21,859 a day), and more than 313,000 were created chain-wide in the week to 31 August 2026.

How many meme coins are there in total?

The traded population is the only countable one. CoinGecko examined every pump.fun token that ever recorded a trade from January 2024 to June 2026 and found 18.67 million. That is a single venue on a single chain, and at the current pace it adds roughly 9.5 million a year.

Who is creating all these meme coins?

More than the token count suggests, because most creators launch once. Our window recorded 630 launches from 377 distinct wallets, 78.2% of which appeared exactly once. Marino et al. counted 243,123 distinct creator addresses across one month of pump.fun launches.

Do meme coin creators actually make money?

Collectively, a lot — $11,314,863 in August 2026 and $96,355,495 all time on pump.fun alone. Individually, almost none. The median token in our sample had zero net buying and therefore zero creator fees, while five tokens out of 630 held 52.3% of all the liquidity in the sample.

What percentage of meme coins succeed?

Roughly 1% by any strict measure. In our sample 20.0% traded above their starting price, 6.19% passed $5,000, and 1.11% reached the ~$41,800 graduation threshold. Independent research measured a 0.63% graduation rate across 655,770 tokens, and 68.67% of all pump.fun tokens ever traded stopped trading on their first day.

Is it too late to launch a meme coin in 2026?

Supply was never the constraint. Half of all launches ship without a description and only 2.4% list a Telegram, so the competitive bar is far lower than the launch count implies. What is scarce is attention, and that has been the scarce input since the first memecoin.

How much does it cost to create a meme coin on Solana?

About 0.22 SOL all-in through a no-code creator — the ~0.0191 SOL on-chain floor plus a flat service fee — and about 0.32 SOL with mint authority revoked. Liquidity is separate: roughly 0.4 SOL of Raydium pool rent plus the 5-25 SOL you seed. The full itemisation is in what it costs to create a Solana token.

Should I launch on a bonding curve or mint directly?

A curve costs nothing upfront and needs no liquidity from you, but takes 1.25% of every trade and returns 0.300% to you, and you never own the pool. A direct mint costs a flat fee once, takes nothing from your volume, and leaves the LP and the authority settings yours from minute zero. The crossover on a 2.5% round trip is about 13 SOL of cumulative volume.

The one-line version

How many meme coins are created every day is a question with an uncomfortable answer and a useful one. The uncomfortable answer is 25,908 a day, one every 3.3 seconds, from 377 different wallets in the time it takes to watch a TV episode. The useful answer is that 80% of them never attract a single net buy and half ship without a sentence of description — so the number that looks like impossible competition is mostly a measure of how little it costs to not try.

The money is real: $11.31M paid to creators in the best month yet, $96.36M all time. It is also won by a handful of tokens with an audience attached. If you want to be one of them, the launch is the cheap, fast, five-minute part — create the token, then spend your actual effort on the launch checklist and on giving people a reason to show up.