The meme coin boom has made some Web3 bros incredibly rich. But a new study published on Cornell University’s arXiv suggests the ecosystem is better understood as a place of extreme churn, flimsy infrastructure, and a surprising number of scammy projects that disappear quickly.
Researchers Alberto Maria Mongardini at the Technical University of Denmark and Alessandro Mei at the Sapienza University of Rome built MemeChain, an open-source, cross-chain dataset of 34,988 meme coins across Ethereum, BNB Smart Chain (BSC), Solana, and Base. The system combines on-chain records with off-chain “legitimacy” signals such as token logos, social links, and archived website HTML.
MemeChain found that through mid-January 2025, 1,801 tokens, or around 5% of all the coins tracked, stopped trading within 24 hours of launch. Nearly half showed zero transaction activity from mid-October to mid-December 2024, suggesting many projects burn out within weeks. Around 10% of meme coins on the BNB Smart Chain lasted only a single day, compared with roughly 0.1% on Solana.
Mongardini said the team began by watching “this wave of new created meme coins” across chains in 2024 and asking who was trying to exploit the hype and FOMO. While he expected some level of alleged impropriety, he was surprised by the scale of scammy rug pulls and short-lived meme coins. “It’s shocking to me,” he said.
Some indicators helped signal whether a coin was likely to rug pull. While 74.8% of tokens claimed an associated website, only 32.1% of those sites returned a working “HTTP 200” response when tested. The researchers also found widespread use of cheap registrars and short-lived hosting, which Mongardini described as “very, very fragile” infrastructure built with “very, very low” effort because creators “want to capitalize as soon as possible.”
The aim of developing tools that can warn investors about high-risk trades is “to make a safer environment for people that [use] the crypto markets,” Mei said, though he added that doing so “in real time is very expensive.” Buyer beware.