Meme Coin Market Cap 2026: $36B by Coin & Chain
The meme coin market cap is $36.45B, 76% below its record, yet launchpad fees just hit $10.3M a day. See the data by coin and chain, then launch your own.
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The meme coin market cap is $36.45 billion, and that number hides the real story. On 27 September 2026 CoinGecko's meme category was worth 1.26% of a $2.88 trillion crypto market. That is 76% below the $150.6 billion record of December 2024, and our basket of the 28 largest meme coins lost 51% of its value over the last year. But the money people pay to launch and trade new meme coins went the other way. Fees paid to meme coin launchpads averaged $10.34 million a day in September, more than four times the rate of a year ago and the highest month in our data. The meme coin market has split in two. The capitalised part, led by Dogecoin, keeps shrinking. The launch economy is busier than it has been all year, and most of it has left Solana for Robinhood Chain in the last three months.
This report measures both halves with public data: the memecoin market cap by coin, by chain and by age, the launchpad fee split, and what the numbers say about meme coin season and the memecoin supercycle. Every figure was pulled on 27 September 2026 from CoinGecko and DefiLlama, and both charts are drawn from those raw files. Disclosure: we build Alchemii, a meme coin creator, so we have a stake in the market this article describes. Nothing here is investment advice.
Quick Facts: meme coin market cap today
Read the six numbers in two groups. The first four describe what meme coins are worth, and all of them point down: the total is small against crypto as a whole, far below its record, and lower than it was a year ago. The last two describe how the value is shared and how busy the market is. Ownership is extremely concentrated, and activity has rarely been higher. Most coverage of the meme coin market reports only the first group. If you are deciding whether to create a coin, the second group matters more, because it measures how many people are trading new tokens right now.
A note on the headline figure. Total meme coin market cap depends on who is counting. CoinGecko's category included about $36.45B of coins on the day we pulled it; CoinMarketCap and trade press use slightly different lists, and a Yahoo Finance roundup from early September put the sector at $31.2B across roughly 6,270 tracked tokens. The direction matches across sources even where the totals differ. We use CoinGecko throughout so the snapshot, the top-10 table and the 12-month basket can all be compared.
The meme coin market over 12 months: from $70.6B to $30.1B
CoinGecko's public API does not provide history for a whole category, so we built one. We summed the daily market caps of the 28 largest meme coins that have a full 365-day record, including DOGE, SHIB, PEPE, PUMP, TRUMP, BONK, WIF, FARTCOIN and 20 more. Together they are about 83% of the category today, so the basket follows the sector closely.
The year falls into three phases.
- October 2025, the crash. The basket peaked at $70.62B on 7 October. Three days later came the largest liquidation event CoinGlass has recorded: combined long and short liquidations exceeded $19B on 10 October, and CoinGlass estimates the true figure was closer to $30–40B once late-reporting venues are counted. The basket went from $65.89B to $51.42B between 00:00 UTC on the 10th and the 11th, a 22% loss in one day. It never recovered that level.
- November 2025 to June 2026, the slide. A short January bounce took the basket back to about $44B. Otherwise it made lower highs for nine months: below $40B by late November, below $30B by March, and $19.48B on 1 July 2026, down 72% from the peak.
- July to September 2026, the bounce. The basket is up 55% from that low, to $30.12B on 27 September. The jump came in the second half of August, when PUMP's market cap rose 86% and TRUMP's 93% in two weeks alongside Bitcoin's late-August rally, and September has added about 16% more.
Why are meme coins down? One crash, then no buyers for old coins
The crash explains the level. It does not explain why the slide lasted nine months. The better explanation is in the next section: buyers kept arriving, but they bought new tokens. A meme coin crash like October's wipes out leveraged bets in hours. What keeps prices low afterwards is money moving on to newer coins. Older coins lose buyers to new launches much faster than new launches add to the sector's total value.
Largest meme coins by market cap: Dogecoin still owns 41.6%
| Meme coin | Chain | Market cap | Share | All-time high | From ATH | 1-year price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dogecoin (DOGE) | Dogecoin | $15.15B | 41.6% | May 2021 | −87% | −58% |
| Shiba Inu (SHIB) | Ethereum | $3.49B | 9.6% | Oct 2021 | −93% | −50% |
| MemeCore (M) | MemeCore | $2.74B | 7.5% | Jul 2026 | −79% | −49% |
| Pump.fun (PUMP) | Solana | $2.21B | 6.1% | Sep 2025 | −46% | −11% |
| Pepe (PEPE) | Ethereum | $1.84B | 5.0% | Dec 2024 | −84% | −53% |
| Pudgy Penguins (PENGU) | Solana | $0.64B | 1.8% | Dec 2024 | −85% | −63% |
| Official Trump (TRUMP) | Solana | $0.60B | 1.6% | Jan 2025 | −97% | −72% |
| 币安人生 (BinanceLife) | BNB Chain | $0.50B | 1.4% | Jun 2026 | −44% | < 1 year old |
| SPX6900 (SPX) | Ethereum | $0.41B | 1.1% | Jul 2025 | −80% | −55% |
| Bonk (BONK) | Solana | $0.33B | 0.9% | Nov 2024 | −94% | −81% |
The leaderboard has changed less than the rest of the market. Dogecoin (launched 2013) and Shiba Inu (2020) are still first and second, and PEPE is fifth. Two newer tokens are in the top five: MemeCore, a meme-branded layer 1, and PUMP, pump.fun's own token, which is the best performer of the ten over the year at −11%. The only coin under a year old is 币安人生 ("BinanceLife") on BNB Chain, at $0.50B.
How concentrated is the meme coin market?
| Slice of the meme coin market | Share of the $36.45B | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Dogecoin | 41.6% | One 2013 coin is two-fifths of the sector |
| Top 3 (DOGE, SHIB, M) | 58.6% | More than half sits in three coins |
| Top 10 | 76.6% | Three-quarters in ten coins |
| Top 100 | 94.2% | Every other coin in the category shares 5.8% |
| 27 coins under a year old in the top 100 | 6.0% ($2.18B) | New launches are a large count and a small cap |
| 4 coins whose high was in 2021 | 51.4% ($18.72B) | Most of the cap is from the last cycle |
This is the most useful table in the report for anyone thinking about launching. Four coins that peaked in 2021 still make up 51.4% of the sector's value. The 27 top-100 coins that did not exist a year ago make up 6.0%. In value terms, the meme coin market is mostly the last cycle's winners losing value slowly. Almost everything you read about "meme coin dominance" is really about Dogecoin's price.
86% below the high: the drawdown math
| Year the coin set its all-time high | Coins in the top 100 | Their market cap today |
|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 4 | $18.72B |
| 2022–2023 | 2 | $0.09B |
| 2024 | 29 | $5.02B |
| 2025 | 30 | $5.16B |
| 2026 | 35 | $5.34B |
The median top-100 meme coin is 86% below its all-time high, and 47 of the 100 are down 90% or more. The other side of that is more interesting. 35 of the top 100 set their high in 2026, and most of those are in the young cohort on BNB Chain, Robinhood Chain and Solana. New winners keep appearing, but at a few hundred million dollars each, not tens of billions. For a creator, that sets the realistic ceiling. A good outcome in 2026 is a coin that reaches the lower end of the top 100 for a few weeks, not the next DOGE.
Meme coin market cap by chain
Where a coin lives matters to anyone choosing where to launch. To measure meme coin market cap by chain, we assigned each of the top 100 meme coins to the first platform CoinGecko lists for it, which is its home chain.
| Home chain | Coins in top 100 | Market cap | Share | Under 1 year old | Largest |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dogecoin (own chain) | 1 | $15.15B | 44.1% | 0 | DOGE |
| Ethereum | 14 | $6.62B | 19.3% | 0 | SHIB, PEPE, SPX, FLOKI |
| Solana | 29 | $5.55B | 16.2% | 5 | PUMP, PENGU, TRUMP, BONK |
| MemeCore (own chain) | 1 | $2.74B | 8.0% | 0 | M |
| BNB Chain | 26 | $2.22B | 6.5% | 12 | 币安人生, B, COCO |
| Base | 9 | $0.64B | 1.9% | 2 | TIBBIR, BABYCLAW, BRETT |
| Robinhood Chain | 7 | $0.54B | 1.6% | 7 | AI, CASHCAT, BONER |
| Everything else | 13 | $0.88B | 2.6% | 1 | APEPE, DOG, ORDI |
There are three ways to read this table.
- By value, it is still Dogecoin and Ethereum. The Dogecoin chain plus Ethereum hold 63% of the top-100 value, and not one of their 15 top-100 coins is under a year old. Nobody is launching the next big coin there.
- By count, Solana is the home of meme coins. 29 of the top 100 are Solana tokens, the most of any chain, worth $5.55B. Five of them are new. Solana is where memes last long enough to join the table: PENGU, TRUMP, BONK, WIF and FARTCOIN all launched there.
- The new coins are on BNB Chain and Robinhood Chain. 12 of BNB Chain's 26 top-100 memes, and all 7 of Robinhood Chain's, are under a year old. Robinhood Chain meme coins went from zero to seven of the top 100 in about three months. If you want the background on it, we explain the network in what is Robinhood Chain.
For the Solana-specific picture, including SOL's own rally and on-chain fees, see our Solana market update.
Where the money goes now: meme coin launchpad fees by chain
Market cap measures what holders own. Launchpad fees measure what traders pay, every day, to launch and trade new meme coins. That is the better gauge of where the meme coin market is active today. We summed DefiLlama's per-chain fee data for the 25 largest launchpads, which make up about 98% of the category, and averaged each month per day so the part-month of September compares fairly.
September 2026 averaged $10.34M a day, 4.2 times September 2025 and nearly three times the next-best month, August 2026 ($3.63M). Solana's share fell from 92% to 31%, but its fees did not shrink. Solana launchpads took in $3.16M a day in September, their best month in the window, helped by StonkFun, a Solana launchpad whose tokens are paired with tokenized stocks. Solana is not losing traders. Robinhood Chain added a larger pool of fees on top.
Switch between chains to see each one's launch waves month by month:
Pons vs pump.fun fees: the fair comparison
Headlines this month said Pons out-earned pump.fun every day since 29 August. On curve fees alone that is true: $140.74M against $45.33M over 30 days. But the two figures count different things. DefiLlama's Pons V2 figure includes swap fees after graduation, on Uniswap v4. pump.fun's excludes PumpSwap, the pool its coins trade in after they graduate. Count the full path from launch to pool for both, and the result is a tie.
| 30 days to 26 Sep 2026 | Pons (V1 + V2) | pump.fun + PumpSwap |
|---|---|---|
| Chain | Robinhood Chain (live since July 2026) | Solana (since January 2024) |
| Launch-curve fees | Included in V2 total | $45.33M |
| Post-graduation swap fees | Included in V2 total | $102.17M |
| Total fees | $146.98M | $147.50M |
| Fee per trade | 1% swap fee, ~70% to the creator | 1.25% on the curve; PumpSwap tiered from 1.25% down to 0.30% |
| Daily fees, 16 Sep → 26 Sep | $2.41M → $1.65M (V2) | $1.47M → $2.70M (pump.fun) |
| Risk on the calendar | Robinhood's 90-day gas waiver ends ~29 Sep | None scheduled |
This is the second time in twelve months that pump.fun lost the top launchpad spot. In October 2025 BNB Chain's four.meme took $44.0M in fees against pump.fun's $37.5M. The Pons launchpad is a more serious challenger than four.meme was, and it is only three months old. For more on how much pump.fun itself earns, see how much money pump.fun makes.
The 29 September gas subsidy cliff
Robinhood has paid gas for users of its chain since a 90-day waiver began on 1 July. The Motley Fool and crypto.news both date its end to around 29 September, two days after this report. Pons V2's daily fees had already fallen from $2.41M on 16 September to $1.65M on the 26th. If trading on Robinhood Chain keeps its volume once users pay gas, the shift is real. If it doesn't, the September chart will look like the earlier BNB Chain and Base waves.
Is it meme coin season? Is the memecoin supercycle over?
Search interest says people are asking. US searches for "meme coin market" went from 50 a month to 210 in three months, according to DataForSEO. Here is what the data says.
| Meme season signal | Sep 2025 | Low point | Sep 2026 | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 28-coin basket market cap | $61.9B | $19.5B (1 Jul 2026) | $30.1B | Not a price season: −51% on the year |
| Launchpad fees per day | $2.45M | $1.01M (Jun 2026) | $10.34M | Record for the period: 4.2× |
| Launchpad + PumpSwap fees per day | $4.92M | $2.34M (Jun 2026) | $13.72M | 2.8× even on the fair measure |
| pump.fun share of launchpad fees | 67.8% | — | 14.1% | The venue changed |
| Top-100 memes setting a high in 2026 | — | — | 35 of 100 | New winners exist, and they are small |
| pump.fun curve completion (our census) | — | 3.09% (4 Sep 2026) | 3.58% (27 Sep 2026) | Launch quality edging up |
It is meme coin season for launches, not for prices. Every activity signal is up and every value signal is down. That is the pattern of a market where a steady flow of new tokens competes for the same buyers.
The memecoin supercycle, checked against the data
The phrase dates to Token2049 in September 2024, where trader Murad Mahmudov predicted a "memecoin supercycle". Three months later the sector hit its $150.6B record, per CoinGecko's State of Memecoins report. By February 2025 Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan was predicting its end, arguing that stablecoins, tokenization and institutional Bitcoin would take the attention. Both calls were right about different halves of the market. The price supercycle ended: CoinGecko had the sector at $47.2B by November 2025, and it is $36.45B now. The activity never stopped. It moved to newer chains.
Meme coin season now rotates by chain
| Chain wave | Peak month | Launchpad fees per day at peak | One month later | Driver |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| BNB Chain | Oct 2025 | $1.61M | $0.18M (−89%) | four.meme ($44.0M in the month, more than pump.fun's $37.5M) |
| Base | Feb 2026 | $0.81M | $0.05M (−94%) | clanker ($22.4M in the month) |
| Solana | Sep 2026 | $3.16M | Still running | pump.fun + StonkFun; the previous high was $2.63M in Jan 2026 |
| Robinhood Chain | Sep 2026 (month 3) | $5.35M | Gas waiver ends ~29 Sep | Pons, gas-free trading |
This is the most important pattern for anyone timing a launch. The last two meme waves away from Solana each lost about 90% of their launch fees within a month. Solana's baseline never dropped below $0.89M a day, even at the June low. A new chain gives early launchers a thin market with little competition. A mature chain gives them a steady flow of traders. Robinhood Chain is in its third month, and its subsidy is about to end. Our Robinhood Chain launch guide covers the practical side if you want to try it.
What the meme coin market means if you are creating a coin
Four conclusions follow from the data, and each changes something about how you launch.
- Aim for the top 100, not for Dogecoin. The coins launched in the last year that made the top 100 are worth $20M to $500M. Plan your supply, liquidity and marketing for a coin that gets noticed on one chain's trending feeds. For how many coins you are competing with, see how many meme coins are created every day.
- Don't wait for the whole market to turn. Launch activity hit a record while prices fell. Traders are active now; they are just buying new coins.
- Choose the chain for its traders, not its hype. A new chain means less competition but a wave that may fade fast. Solana has the steadiest audience and the most coins that last. Both are fine choices if you are clear about which one you are making.
- Keep the upside instead of renting it. On a bonding curve every trade pays the platform (1.25% per buy and sell on pump.fun) until the coin graduates. A direct launch costs a flat fee once, and you own the pool. If you already have an audience, the flat fee costs less after about 9 SOL of trading volume.
If you are ready, the fastest route is to create a meme coin on Solana from the Alchemii homepage. Set the name, ticker and image; supply and decimals are pre-filled; revoke mint authority in the same transaction; then open your own pool with the create liquidity tool. If you would rather copy a format that is already working, the Trending board fills in the creator from a live pump.fun coin. Before you spend anything, read why most Solana memecoins die in 24 hours. For the bear-case argument, see are memecoins dead.
Limitations
The headline figure is CoinGecko's category total, and other trackers include different coins. The 12-month series is our 28-coin basket, not the whole category. We dropped BRETT because the API returned zero market caps, and ai16z because its migration to elizaOS makes the old ticker's value collapse. Chain assignment uses the first platform CoinGecko lists, so bridged versions of a coin are ignored. Launchpad fees come from DefiLlama's protocol adapters, whose methods differ: Pons V2 includes post-graduation swaps, Flap includes token-tax payouts, and pump.fun excludes PumpSwap. We flag each of these where it matters. September 2026 covers 1–26 September. Search-volume figures are DataForSEO estimates. None of this is investment advice.
Summary
The total meme coin market cap is $36.45B, 1.26% of crypto, and three-quarters of it sits in ten coins led by Dogecoin. It is 76% below its December 2024 record, and our 28-coin basket is down 51% on the year after the October 2025 crash and a nine-month slide. The launch economy tells the opposite story: $10.34M a day in launchpad fees, a record for the period. Robinhood Chain now takes more than half of that, and Solana's fees are at their highest in a year even as its share falls. It is a good season for creators, not for holders.
FAQ
What is the total meme coin market cap right now?
The total meme coin market cap was $36.45B on 27 September 2026, according to CoinGecko's meme category, with $2.54B traded in the previous 24 hours. That is 1.26% of the $2.88T crypto market and 76% below the $150.6B record CoinGecko recorded in December 2024. Dogecoin alone is 41.6% of the figure, and the ten largest coins hold 76.6%.
Why are meme coins down?
Mostly because of one day and one long slide. On 10 October 2025 more than $19B of leveraged positions were liquidated, the largest event CoinGlass has tracked, and our 28-coin meme basket fell 22% in a day. It then drifted lower for nine months to a $19.48B low on 1 July 2026. New money kept flowing into new launches instead of old coins, so the big 2024–25 names are still 84–97% below their highs.
Is it meme coin season right now?
It is a launch season, not a price season. Fees paid to meme coin launchpads averaged $10.34M a day in September 2026, 4.2 times September 2025 and the highest month in our 13-month window. Meanwhile the 28 largest meme coins are worth 51% less than a year ago. Traders are paying to trade new coins on new venues, mainly Robinhood Chain, not bidding up Dogecoin or Pepe.
Is the memecoin supercycle over?
The price half of it is. Murad Mahmudov popularised the memecoin supercycle idea at Token2049 in 2024, and the meme coin market cap peaked at $150.6B that December. It is now $36.45B. The activity half is not over: launchpad fees in September 2026 beat every month since at least September 2025. If the thesis was that memes would keep minting new winners, it holds. If it was that meme coins would keep rising, it does not.
Which blockchain has the most meme coins by market cap?
By value, Dogecoin's own chain, at 44.1% of the top 100 meme coins, then Ethereum at 19.3% (SHIB, PEPE, SPX, FLOKI) and Solana at 16.2% (PUMP, PENGU, TRUMP, BONK). By count, Solana leads with 29 of the top 100, ahead of BNB Chain with 26. BNB Chain and Robinhood Chain have the most young coins: 12 and 7 top-100 memes that are under a year old.
Is Pons bigger than pump.fun now?
On curve fees alone it looks that way, but that compares different things. Pons V2's figure includes swaps after graduation; pump.fun's excludes PumpSwap, where its coins trade after graduation. Measured the same way, the 30 days to 26 September were a tie: Pons V1 plus V2 earned $146.98M and pump.fun plus PumpSwap $147.50M. Pons' daily fees fell from $2.41M to $1.65M over the last ten days of that window, and Robinhood's gas waiver ends around 29 September.
Should I launch a meme coin now or wait for the next meme coin season?
Waiting for a season has not been a useful strategy in 2026, because seasons now rotate between chains and fade within about a month. What matters more is having a meme, an audience and seed liquidity. If you do, a Solana launch on Alchemii costs about 0.22 SOL all-in, or roughly 0.32 SOL with mint authority revoked, plus your own Raydium pool liquidity. Most new coins fail in every market.
References
Data sources
- Top Meme Coins by Market Cap (meme category) — CoinGecko (accessed 2026-09-27)
- State of Memecoins Report 2025 — CoinGecko Research (accessed 2026-09-27)
- Fees and revenue by protocol (Launchpad category) — DefiLlama (accessed 2026-09-27)
- Pump.fun fees (pump.fun/docs/fees) — pump.fun (accessed 2026-09-27)
- Meme coin — Wikipedia (accessed 2026-09-27)
- CoinGecko: Top meme coins by market cap (meme category)
- CoinGecko Research: State of Memecoins Report 2025 ($150.6B record, $47.2B in November 2025)
- CoinGlass: 2025 crypto derivatives annual report (10 October 2025 liquidations)
- DefiLlama: fees by protocol, Pons V2, pump.fun and PumpSwap
- crypto.news: Pons vs pump.fun, the launchpad war nobody expected
- The Motley Fool: Better crypto launchpad in September, pump.fun vs Pons
- Benzinga: Murad Mahmudov's memecoin supercycle call at Token2049
- The Defiant: Bitwise CIO predicts end of memecoin supercycle
- Yahoo Finance: 3 meme coins to watch in September 2026 (sector size)
- pump.fun: fee documentation
- Wikipedia: Meme coin
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