2024 saw massive gains for the crypto market, but meme coins dominated the narrative.
Due to its remarkable resurgence, several meme coins even emerged as some of the best performing cryptocurrencies of the year, contributing to the rise of new crypto millionaires along the way.
Speculative Meme Coins Take Over Crypto
According to CoinGecko’s report, meme coins captured more than 30% of global investor interest, which was distributed across the core narrative of the niche and 25 different trends related to them.
This suggests that nearly a third of crypto’s focus was on speculative investments, where fundamentals took a backseat, and the market quickly diversified from dog-themed coins to other tokens. memes inspired by animals and public figures.
The main narrative of meme coins emerged as the most popular, accounting for 14.36% of the total interest in the crypto narrative, which reflects a considerable increase of 6.04 percentage points from 8.32% of the last year Aside from the general category of meme coins, other specific trends also drew attention.
Solana-based meme tokens took 4th place with 7.65% narrative interest, while Coinbase-incubated Ethereum Layer 2-based assets took 11th place with 2.13%. Meanwhile, AI-themed and cat-centric meme coins rounded out the top 20, with 1.49% and 1.19% interest, respectively.
AI, RWA, DePIN Trails Behind
The artificial intelligence (AI) narrative was another prominent theme in the crypto market in 2024, attracting a total of 15.67% of investor interest in the overall AI narrative and five other AI-related subtrends. The AI lead narrative ranked second overall, with 12.58% of investor attention.
While this represented an increase of 1.26 percentage points from last year’s 11.32%, it was still dwarfed by the meme coin narrative in terms of popularity.
Real World Assets (RWA) and DePIN narratives are among the most notable trends to experience increased interest in 2024 compared to the previous year. The RWA narrative saw its share of investor attention increase by 2.16 percentage points, from 6.48% in 2023 to 8.64% in 2024, which also increased its ranking from 6th to 3rd.
Similarly, the DePIN narrative saw a positive shift, with its share of interest growing by 1.56 percentage points, moving it up from 13th to 8th place. On the other hand, the GameFi narrative faced a decline in popularity, as its share fell by 6.77 percentage points, from 10.49% in 2023 to 3.72% in 2024.
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