AI tokens, memecoins dominate crypto narratives in Q1 2025: CoinGecko

The cryptocurrency market is still recycling old narratives, with few new trends yet to emerge and replace the dominant themes in the first quarter of 2025.

Artificial intelligence tokens and memecoins were the dominant crypto narrative in the first quarter of 2025, accounting for 62.8% of investor interest, according to a quarterly research report by CoinGecko. AI tokens captured 35.7% of global investor interest, overtaking the 27.1% share of memecoins, which remained in second place.

Out of the top 20 crypto narratives of the quarter, six were memecoin categories while five were AI-related.

“Seems like we have yet to see another new narrative emerge and we are still following past quarters’ trends,” said Bobby Ong, the co-founder and chief operating officer of CoinGecko, in an April 17 X post. “I guess we are all tired from the same old trends repeating themselves.”

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Interest in memecoins saw a sharp increase ahead of US President Donald Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20 after his team launched the Official Trump (TRUMP) memecoin on Jan. 18 and the Official Melania (MELANIA) token on Jan. 19 on the Solana network.

However, some industry watchers are concerned that memecoins are draining capital from utility tokens, such as Solana (SOL), limiting their price potential.

SOL has fallen by around 48% in the past three months since Trump’s inauguration, when it briefly peaked above $270, TradingView data shows.

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The crypto industry took another hit after the collapse of the Libra (LIBRA) token, a memecoin endorsed by Argentine President Javier Milei, which wiped out $4 billion in market value within hours after insiders allegedly withdrew over $107 million in liquidity, causing a 94% price crash.

Memecoins “fell off a cliff” after the Libra scandal as the number of new tokens deployed on Solana’s Pump.fun saw a drastic fall, the report stated, adding:

While the Libra scandal marked the end of the “politicam memecoin” trend, the industry’s most profitable traders are still hunting for speculative memecoin investments despite the end of the memecoin supercycle.

“There was the recent meme surge and smart money is always happy to capitulate on that,” Nicolai Sondergaard, a research analyst at Nansen, told Cointelegraph, adding that memecoins may only be a “fun play” for smart investors, as they aren’t affected by the same macroeconomic concerns as Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH).

At the end of March, a savvy trader turned an initial investment of just $2,000 into $43 million with the popular Pepe (PEPE) memecoin, but missed selling the top, locking in a realized profit of over $10 million, despite Pepe’s over 70% decline.

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