Meme tokens keep returning to the center of crypto for a reason. Every cycle tries to reduce them to speculation, then the market remembers the same thing again: culture brings attention, attention brings liquidity, and communities decide what survives. The category still attracts rugs, insider games and launches that live for one candle, but also strong brands, real liquidity and people who stay.
The question running through ChangeNOW’s recent X Space was if meme tokens still run on hype alone or whether the category has matured into something more durable.
Tension ran through our Space with Baby Doge, Dogelon Mars and Landwolf. The speakers didn't sugarcoat market behavior
They spoke openly about speculation, thin liquidity and weak launches, while returning again and again to culture, community and the people who stay after the first pump fades.
Why Meme Tokens Still Pull Users In
For many retail users, meme tokens are still the easiest entry point into crypto. They are easier to notice, talk about, and buy. This is the reason why users keep searching how to buy meme tokens, where to swap meme tokens and which meme token routes are available.
Pug from Baby Doge described this appeal from the user side:
“If you think about investing in some crypto technology, you think you need to go do the research, go through all the phases and steps to understand and have a valuation in your mind to be encouraging enough to invest your money. But meme coins give you that with just a click of buy or sell. It's a simplified way into crypto.”
This framing helps explain why meme tokens keep coming back through rough cycles. They can serve different users in different ways.
Pug put that directly:
“If you want a lottery ticket, buy meme coins. If you want strong community support, buy meme coins. If you want to be involved in a social project, buy meme coins. That's a lot of simplified answers for a lot of demand.”
He then gave the clearest line of the Space on why the category persists:
“I think the reason to come back is the culture, because you cannot just pull culture out of people. It's impossible to do.”
Culture Needs a Story
That idea led into a second question: what kind of culture actually lasts?
Pug gave an example. Some memecoins go up because somebody tweeted something. Then millions of them get minted on Pump.fun one second after the tweet. A real meme project needs a bigger story.
One tweet from a public figure does not create longevity. Neither does a news spike. The opportunist bunch abuses the system. They see a tweet and launch a token immediately and produce no community and no story, only extraction.
His warning was direct:
“You need to actually do your own research or meme coins too right and you need to weed out that if it's a real meme coin or just a rug pull.”
What Gives A Meme Project Staying Power
Baby Doge brought in the mission angle. Pug spoke about the project’s charity work and why that takes place internally:
“I have two dogs myself, so I really appreciate that. I never had the feeling when I worked for a company or a project that I felt proud of what they did before me – in terms of the vision and mission and everything.”
He defined that work as part of the project’s core strength:
“We actually believe in it. I mean, we think it's our most powerful muscle in the community.”
Marky from Dogelon Mars came at longevity from market structure. He compared today’s launch environment with 2021:
“In 2021, there weren't nearly as many meme coins launched as there are today with Pump.fun and thousands of coins coming out every day. So when a good token launched, people rallied behind it.”
He followed with a sharper read on the current market:
“People would rally together instead of just like PVP and vulturing and trying to like kill all the different coins, you know, like it's a very different space in that sense for launching tokens.”
Landwolf added the trenches version. Kek described how a community can form through shared losses and shared conviction:
“It was just a bunch of people that have been losing in the space and being and getting dragged through the mud. We all just came together and decided to get behind something and a narrative and push it hard.”
And two years later, his benchmark is still participation:
“Here we are two years later, still showing up every single day. All the chats are still super active, which says a lot because the market hasn't been in our favor recently.”
Taken together, those examples support a solid point: meme tokens still depend on attention though attention alone does not create longevity. The projects with persistence tend to have social depth.
They build identity, internal culture and reasons for holders to remain involved beyond a price spike.
All in all, this makes the category feel less like a single market segment and more like two parallel worlds. One runs on fast turnover. The other runs on narrative continuity and community memory.
What Success Looks Like When Price Is Not Enough
The Space never tried to separate meme tokens from speculation.
Marky said that plainly:
“I've always classified meme coins as a leverage bet on the crypto space. So you know, Bitcoin's running well, or Bitcoin's crumbling for the last, you know, last week or whatever meme coins are going to get hit harder.”
At the same time, he tied longevity to something else:
“The culture behind these tokens and these projects and the community behind them is largely what builds the longevity.”
Kek added the liquidity side. He described the current market in simple terms:
“Liquidity is drying up. Like, I'm not going to beat around the bush, right? Like, look at what Bitcoin's done in the last week. It hasn't been great, right? The price action hasn't been great. But it's been a very, very small conversation amongst the community.”
Then he gave a practical view of survival:
“It's just weathering the storm, building the foundation. And once you have that foundation, that core community that won't give up, you know, when people come back into the space and they're looking for something to bid, well, things start falling back into place, right?”
One of the strongest images from the Space captured the market structure itself:
“It's hard for projects to have staying power because it's not really much actual depth of liquidity. It's just rotation. That's all you're seeing. It's like a game of musical chairs and then when the music stops, everybody's running to grab that bag.”
Kek also pushed back on price as the only scorecard:
“I don't think that price is reflective, completely reflective as far as success goes, because you have a lot of people that launch bundled projects, they run it up and then it rugs, right? The price might go up, but that's not a large group of people winning.”
His measure of success focused on what remains after the rush:
“I think that if you've stood the test of time, if you've built cool stuff, if you've made a good network, I think that that's pretty successful, you know? It doesn't always necessarily have to be incentivized by money.”
Closing Thoughts
The meme token market in 2026 feels more selective. Easy hype still exists, yet the split looks sharper now. Some projects keep people active after the first pump. Others fade as soon as liquidity moves on.
At ChangeNOW , we have always backed meme culture for the people behind it. We keep strong ties with foundations that build real things. Culture and community brought mass adoption to crypto. Mass adoption is the reason ChangeNOW exists and keeps growing.
We track the meme token side of crypto through communities, holders and daily activity. Strong meme projects live through repetition, shared jokes, loyal holders and people who keep showing up when the chart gets boring.
Follow Pug from Baby Doge, Marky from Dogelon Mars and Kek from Landwolf if you want to stay close to the projects with real community energy.
Follow ChangeNOW as well. We keep meme token routes open for communities with staying power.
