The end of the memecoin bear is near.
I think the memecoin bear front ran the actual bear back in mid-January 2025, when Trump/Melania launched.
With that as the starting point, we’ve been in the memecoin bear for 525+ days.
For comparison, the 2021 memecoin bull ended in late October when Shib hit a $41B market cap.
At the time, the entire memecoin market peaked around $88 Billion.
It then restarted 530+ days later in mid-April 2023, when Pepe launched.
After Pepe took off, memes went on a 2-year run and brought in millions of new participants.
The total memecoin market cap nearly doubled the previous cycle by peaking around $150 Billion.
Memecoin daily volume went from $1.1B in 2023 to $9.7B in 2024.
Now as we look forward, I think the main difference no one talks about is the participation.
During the 2022/2023 bear, most of the 2021 meme crowd was gone.
People actually left.
Now we’re in 2026 and a lot of the previous bull participants are still around and lurking because they didn’t win big enough to walk away.
They’re just sidelined, tired, and waiting for the spark.
That’s why I think our starting base of active/lurking participants is probably an order of magnitude bigger.
So, when the new bull run is ignited, we don’t just have a new cohort coming in, but we have a massive bucket of existing users ready to pour back in too.
So, with that, I believe we’re set up for the biggest memecoin season we’ve ever seen.