Memecoins used to be an excellent way to tell how excited people were about buying things, but as the year comes to an end, they are losing liquidity, participation, and speculative interest.
Memecoins are selling for almost the lowest prices of the year, which is a major difference from the speculative peak that came around Christmas 2024.
CoinMarketCap says that memecoins lost 65% of their value during the course of the year, which brought their market cap down to $35 billion on December 19, 2025. They made up some of their losses on Friday and moved back up to almost $36 billion.
CoinMarketCap says that last Christmas Day, memecoins were worth about $100 billion. The value of memecoins fell by 72% during the year to $3.05 trillion as average investors moved away from highly speculative assets.
Falling market caps signal retreat from high-risk
Memecoins have been a fantastic tool to find out how much risk retail traders are ready to take in the past. The sector’s market cap has gone down, which suggests the market is more cautious and it’s harder to get capital.
Political hype accelerated the boom and the bust
A lot of the reason memecoins developed so quickly in 2024 was because of political news. People started to guess what would happen in the sector based on elections.
CoinGecko says that the excitement around the US presidential elections pushed memecoin prices to record highs. Election-themed tokens were extensively present across social media platforms, launchpads, and on-chain events.
However, that political initiative further exacerbated the situation within the sector until 2025. The emergence of popular political memecoins, such as US President Donald Trump’s Libra and Argentina President Javier Milei’s Libra, marked a significant development.
CoinGecko additionally observed that abrupt declines in prices and insider trading undermine consumer confidence and erode their trust.
In December, the prices of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), another speculative segment of the cryptocurrency market, experienced a significant decline, paralleling the drop in memecoin values. In December, CoinGecko said that NFTs fell to $2.5 billion, their lowest point in 2025. This decrease was the same as the 72% collapse in memecoins from their January peak of $9.2 billion.
CryptoSlam, an NFT data tracker, claimed that activity also plummeted. For the first time since April 2021, there were fewer than 100,000 sellers every week.