DON'T BUY Memecoins in 2025 Until You Watch This

It starts with a tweet, a meme, a viral image. All of a sudden, there's a token created. Pump Fun creates a token. It's up 20x50x. You're getting FOMO. Should you buy. Three days later, the narrative ends, the market crashes, and now you've lost your money. Meme coins are an amazing way to make a lot of money really, really quickly. It is also an amazing way to lose your money really, really quickly. I personally have exposure to meme coins and in this video, I'm going to share with you what my allocation of meme coins, what I bought, how to pick a meme coin and what to avoid. I'm going to give you a checklist to look at when looking at meme coins and investing, and I'm going to give you my blueprint on how to try and nail the meme coin cycle, which has been the best sector in the last 12 months. It is a very, very difficult sector to actually win on. 90 to 95% of people lose money in this sector. But I want to give you the beans, the insights that my team at Collective Shift have been looking at for years now in this space. We've been doing this for seven years. We work with over 10,000 clients over the last seven years. And, and now I'm going to try and help you understand what to look at with these meme coins, how to invest, and how I'm playing the market. So let's jump in. Now. When I first started in crypto, meme coins was something I didn't really believe in due to their lack of fundamental nature. The token economics of these cryptocurrencies really just, you know, allows a community and online society to distribute these tokens and create, I guess, a representation of something going on online in the, you know, the digital ecosystem. I was a big, fundamental guy, I still am. But over the last 12 months, you know, as the ecosystem has grown and if you look at the returns in the crypto space, meme coins have been really one of the leading sectors across all the crypto space. And I think for me, really, you know, having an open mind and being open to these things is super important in crypto. Letting the narratives come to you, not chasing the narratives, to understand why these things might be moving and why these things might be important. Now, what even are meme coins? Well, Doge was the first actual meme coin in cryptocurrency, launched back in 2013. It was the original meme coin that really exploded, and again, they initially just sent it out as a joke. And this dogecoin was just a dog. Elon Musk got on the back of it and he started to promote dogecoin in funny ways online. And that was the first coin that was really able to explode in the ecosystem. Now in this video, I really want to dig a little bit deeper into the fundamentals of what makes a good meme coin, what doesn't make a good meme coin. So you have the blueprint to sort of go away, try and figure out how you're going to invest in this space because it is super risky. So many people lose money in this space. You only hear the good stories. I want to share a little bit about my journey and how you can start to find out some of these means. I personally have exposure to a few meme coins. I want to talk about those in this video and try and help you because yes, you can make a lot of money, but you can also lose a lot of money in this space. And over the last six months, eight months, with the launch of Pump Fun on Solana, this has really created this ecosystem where it's been so easy to create coins off the back of something happening online. With a click of a finger in seconds, these new coins are created. And now there's literally millions and millions and millions of these coins online, which is creating more difficulty to try and understand which coins are buying, which coins are not. Now, when it first started probably again 12, 18 months ago, when the meme coins really started to take off, when there's not a huge saturation and exposure of eyeballs in the space, it can be a lot easier to try and figure out which coins are going to pump and which coins aren't. But as sectors evolve and as markets saturate and as people realize there's money to be made, a lot more eyeballs go on, there's a lot more demand and the increase of supply, it can be very hard to try and figure out which coins are going to go up, which coins are going to go down. Now I've got a number of friends that are really in the trenches in this space and you know, they might be looking at say, sub, sometimes sub million dollar market cap coins, sometimes sub $500,000 market coins. These are the super crazy, right on the edge of the trend sort of stuff that you can make a lot of money, but it is like super, super high risk. It's really gambling. However, you do need to have a really good, you know, finger pulse on, on the community and online society, because that is what drives These communities, it's what's ingrained in the online culture. That's essentially what you're buying. And meme coins are like a social token that represents something happening online in the digital ecosystem. That's probably the best way to explain it. Now, before I get into the meme coins that I'm invested in and how you can look at these different sectors, you really need to understand the life cycle of a meme coin because these meme coins, they are created differently, they launch into the market differently, they have different token economics at different investors than normal altcoins or other assets in the space. With meme coins, you've got the launch part, the hype cycle, you've got the crash and the abandonment. And the launch is simply when anonymous creators, influencers will create a token off the back of something happening online. They'll launch in the marketplace and then one or two things going to happen. One is it's just going to crash and burn really quickly because it doesn't get the attention or it gets the hype cycle. And in the hype cycle, this is where social media really pushes the token. There's generally FOMO online. You get influencers starting to promote it. A lot of the big meme coin traders as well have a huge number of copiers or backers, so they'll actually see and have copiers tracking them on the blockchain to see what assets they buy into if they start to get attention. And then you get real hype and fomo, that's when you start to see the meme coin really take off and then you get the crash. And usually with meme coins, if they're low cap assets, they won't last very long. Sometimes you get the ones that break through and you get assets that go up to the hundreds of millions of dollars in market cap. But more often than not, the hype cycle will finish quite quickly. And then you get the crash and it tends to be the first one gets out and then everyone sort of follows after that. If you think about liquidity in a meme coin as well, especially the lower the market cap you go down, the harder it is to actually get assets out or liquidity out. You may see a big return in terms of know 4 or 5, 10x on paper, but if everyone runs to the hills instantly, you need liquidity, you need people to buy what you're selling. And if everyone's on the sell side, that's when things crash and burn really quickly. And the last part of the cycle is the abandonment cycle. And this is what tends to happen when everyone crashes and everyone leaves the project and they move on to the next narrative. Now I've been doing this for seven years now in crypto and one of the biggest things I'm seeing in this cycle is these narratives are moving so fast. You know, previous cycles I made, you know, a few weeks. It goes from narrative to narrative in crypto this cycle and in meme coins especially, it could be like a day, two days, three days maximum. Some of these narratives chop and change, especially if something happens online. A perfect example was when Mike Tyson fought Jake Paul in the fight, you know, a couple of months ago, and he was walking around behind stage before he was getting ready in his, in his room and he was wearing those boxes with nothing on his backside. Within seconds, there was just like thousands and thousands and thousands of tokens created online where you could buy a token that represented that meme that was then circulating the Internet. And then within A or 2, everyone forgotten it, crashing, everything, go back to zero again. And this happens time and time again. These assets, these sectors are created off the back of something that happens in the real world represented online with a token. It goes and blows up and then it, and then it washes over, right Hawk to Ago again, she created her own meme coin. Celebrity meme coins are a whole other thing which I 100% stay clear of. But again, that's what happened. She came out, the meme went viral, there was tokens created, everything went nuts, and then the hype cycle ended. She ended up being creating her own token. That's a whole other story. That was an absolute disaster. But these are the things that happens. And if you want to take advantage of these, these really super early, lower cap meme coin opportunities, you have to be in the trenches, you have to be fast these things, and these things happen super, super quickly. And then you got to pick which token, you've got to figure out which chain. There's so many different things to go into it, which I'll talk about again in this video, very short. So again, you've really got to understand with these meme coins that these, these things happen so, so fast. On average, on Pump Fund, there are nearly 10,000 new tokens created every day. And nine and a half thousand of those tokens die in the same day. The average life cycle of a meme coin is only 12 days, right? So if you're busy, if you're time poor, if you're trying to, you know, work a full time job, you've got a Family. These very early stage Meme Coins are not for you. You have to be in and out super, super quickly again. One of my mates is super deep in the ecosystem of Meme coins is full time trading. This is the craziest stuff I've seen. You might be in a token for hours, right? And then it's sometimes simply a race to the bottom. If you've missed selling near the top and it's the first one to get out wins and most people, you know, lose. There's a lot of pump and dumps, there's a lot of scams, a lot of rug pulls. It is the Wild west and you really need to have that unemotional nature because again, you know, I've heard stories when you sell out some of these tokens really too early again, and you drop the ball and they pump, you know, 10, 20, 50x and you miss out on these, you know, life changing opportunities because you've sold it can be super, super sickening and really destroy your psychology when investing. So you need to be aware that this is like the most euphoric, emotional gambling style activity you can do where you can make life changing money. But it is very difficult to actually do that once you're in the trenches. So we actually took a bit of a deeper dive to figure out how many people are actually making money in a Meme Coin space. This study is pretty crazy. So if you look at Pump Fun, Pump Fun is just a meme coin creating platform where people can go and literally create a, you know, a meme coin within seconds. Nearly 90% of users who traded Meme Coins launch on Pump Fun have either lost all of their investments or made less than $100 in profit. Just repeat that. 90% of people have either lost everything or made less than $100. Less than 3% of traders have made more than $1,000. That's 97% of people have made less than $1,000. Right? Really understand that this takes a level of sophistication and knowledge and tapping in a culture to really be good at this. And also a level of time and commitment. That's the other part that people don't realize. You only hear the good stories in this space. You don't hear the bad side. Another interesting stat when you look at the actual meme coin stat as well. Over the 1.8 million tokens launched on Puffed on Fun, only 1.4% of them graduated. Over the market cap of US$69,000, 1.4% of tokens actually made more than $70,000 in market cap. And that is tiny. If you look at like the, the actual market cap of cryptocurrencies, like you're going down the list and you're not getting anywhere near that sort of level in terms of, you know, low market cap, you're going into thousands, tens of thousands to get to that level. These assets are very, very small in nature, very, very risky. And you need to be aware that, you know, when trading these things, they can do those multiples, but if they don't, again, back to that liquidity issue. If you're getting in so early these tokens, you actually can't make a lot of money. Like you cannot make hundreds of thousands of dollars if the market cap's $70,000, you need buyers to buy those tokens. So really when you're spreading your risk and you're allocating it at that lower levels, you need to have a lot of smaller bets and really build up your portfolio that way rather than just going all in, having huge conviction plays on very, very small assets because you're going to get sniped and you're going to get nuked. So I'm going to talk about my portfolio and the meme coins I'm investing in a second. But why do meme coins fail? Well, the first one is they have a lot of hype but no substance. So they have value tied to fleeting trends, back to things that have happened online, like the Jake Paul, Mike Tyson example or you know, the Hawk Tour girl, or, you know, whatever example. These narratives and these online memes tend to only travel around the world for a couple of days, sometimes maximum. And once the trend ends and people have forgotten about it, these tokens can really die off really quickly. The other big one is the central supply or when you have the cable coins controlled by insiders that lead to manipulation and rug pulls. You know, biggest example is the Hawk Tour meme coin that was released. A lot of insider trading going on. Sorry, alleged, alleged insider trading going on. You could see when they launched the token that a lot of insiders were sniped the launch. A lot of the initial investors that got pre sale were selling off into the community and then these things just absolutely dive down 90, 95%. As I said at the start, I would not touch celebrity coins by any stretch of the imagination. But you need to be aware when they have like these, you know, non native launch meme coins when they've got, you know, supply locked up or they've got initial holders that are getting it or maybe there's early lockups or early investors that get cheaper prices that can unlock it on day one. These are all really, really bad signs of meme coins. You need to be aware of those token economics as well. Yeah. And the other one is just on the back of that is unstable economics. So even if they don't have those insider stuff going on, just huge increasing supply, you know, creating these massive inflation mechanisms that decreases the, the price of the token. When you have these meme coins that have like infinite supply again, some infinite supply tokens are doing all right again. Sometimes none of this stuff actually makes sense and the less it makes sense, the more it's going to pump. So that's another thing with meme coins that sometimes you can overthink these things, but these are just like some basic things to think about as they increase in supply and they really pump those tokens. Just basic supply and demand economics suggests that if the demand starts to slow down, really increasing the supply, the token as well is not going to perform that well. The other thing just to be aware of is the emotional cost or the energy that you're spending in looking at these meme coins. You know, we work with clients with 10, 20, $30 million in their portfolio and they might have like a 10,000, $50,000 degen bag and they're paying more attention to that and their main portfolio. And it's funny because that's like the gambling thing that's, you know, you want to get those 20, 30, 50 X's which is fine, but what tends to happen is you take the eye off the ball, you start to look at this thing that doesn't really make a lot of material difference to your portfolio. And then you've got this other massive portfolio that you've sort of taken the eye off the ball on. And that's the actual thing that is creating you wealth and you need to protect. But now you're looking at something else. So just be aware of the emotional costs, the energy, you know, you're refreshing your portfolio every, every hour. Are you worried you're concerning not sleeping well? They're the other things you need to be aware of with the emotional cost. Now I'm talking about all the negatives here with meme coins. I don't, I don't mean to do that. Like meme coins are a great thing, but just, I'm just trying to create some reality in the space when you're investing in this sector that can really suck a lot of attention and time and space away from everything else. In your world, especially if you have a large portfolio separately. Now, with that being said, meme coins, as I said, are something that you should pay attention to. And I personally have invested into some meme coins over the last 12 months. I'm super excited about that. Have returned really great returns for me. If you look over like the returns of the sectors, Dogecoin's up 10,000% in 2021, Shiba Inu is up 45,000% since its launch and Meme Coins surged over 300% in one year. It was a record breaking sector and you can see that chart below where the meme coins have really outperformed or pretty much all sectors across crypto and tradfi. So it's something that you cannot ignore. It's something that I do believe you should have at least a little exposure to. Retail investors love these coins. They're very retail. Again, something that I've learned in 2024 in crypto is sometimes the more something makes sense from a fundamental perspective, the least it's going to perform. You know, something that makes the least sense performs the best. I know that is so counterintuitive, but that's essentially where we are in crypto right now, especially with these meme coins that these retail investors and these, these narratives that run don't need to have fundamental value. They just need this sort of online society cult narrative like following and that's what really drives these prices. So I think for me the key to a good meme coin investment portfolio is understanding how much time you have and then the risk to reward. So the three meme coins that I've invested in personally are Pepe, WIF and popcat. I've done that because I wanted to get exposure on the Solana blockchain as well as the Ethereum blockchain. Pepe is the, it is the OG meme on the Internet. It's the Green Frog. It's been around for a very long time. This is an Ethereum based meme coin performed really well for me this year. And then Pepe, sorry, then Popcat and WIF are both Solana based meme coins. All in the top 100 mil market. Sorry, all in the top 100 market cap list. I don't like to go too further down just because again you need to be super dialed in. And on top of these meme coins, the further you go down because the shorter the lifespan. But when these meme coins succeed, you can make really life changing amounts of money. And for me they've done really, really well, this year they can create significant profits. But again you just need to be aware that most of these things fail. So when investing really have that risk to reward thing in nature, understand the allocation. You don't need to go bet the farm on these meme coins because they are super volatile and in a pullback or a correction Bitcoin or an altcoin top 100 altcoin might go down 15, 20%. These meme coins may go down 40 or 50%. Right. They're like leveraged positions. Same on the way up. You know they can really get an outperform but also on the way down they're going to underperform as well. So you just need to be aware of that. So have a balanced strategy. Take profits if you've done a 2 or 3x maybe take out your initial investment and really make sure that you know you're taking chips off the table to de risk because in a market slump that's when the meme coins are really going to underperform. Now I want to give you my tips and some metrics and insights and data that you can actually look into to help you pick the right meme coins. It's going to be a checklist for you, your Meme coin investing checklist to help you invest and really nail any investments. When you look at meme coins. So the first one is the unique holders. How many unique holders are there in the asset now? The higher the count, the broader the adoption, the the less centralization. This is arguably a better thing. Use holder scan to analyze wallet distribution. You can see here an image here. We can actually have a look at how many holders there are across the different assets. That gives you a good indication of the distribution online and you know that it's not controlled and super centralized for some of those early stage meme coins. The second one is community activity. Look for genuine community activity and social engagement online. These are really, really important to help the distribution and awareness of your asset. If there's not no distribution and no chatter online, your asset is probably not going to get that much attention and that much growth. The next one is liquidity and trading volume. No trading volume often means there is literally no interest and you really need to have liquidity to want to be able to buy and to be able to sell. And that's what really drives price as well. So make sure there's enough liquidity and interest on the trading side. Tokenomics make sure there's a fair distribution and cap supply reduces that inflation risk. So again, something like the Hawk Tour launched, they had a lot of lockups, a lot of pre sale stuff that unlocked on day one of the launch. This is really, really bad tokenomics. This is not creating that longevity and that long term support for a project. They're essentially saying we're going to buy in at a cheaper rate and then we just dump it all on you on launch. That is really poor token economics. So make sure you look out for that and then a longevity of the narrative. So you really want to make sure you're looking at timeless memes that have the staying power to be around for a long time and not just these fleeting trends that come and go. Now when looking and picking meme coins, just make sure you're looking at diversifying your allocation. I don't like to go all in on just one coin. I like to diversify, have things across chains. Different memes don't go all in on one token. It can be very, very dangerous to do that. That's why I've split mine across three. You can track the holder growth as well. So monitor the changes in wallet distribution. This is a good one. When you can start to see people taking profits, have a look at those whales as they start to sell down, that might be a good indication to start taking profits and really try and avoid coins that are controlled by small groups. And I think for me, the celebrity coins, again I'm going to use that example. A lot of these celebrity coins are controlled by, you know, minority groups. They all get access, they all, you know, try and make out the rich and then really they just dump on the retail upon launch. So just be aware of that and have clear goals. You don't want to hold these things forever. Like in a downturn, meme coins will probably go down 80, 90% against BTC. So in a bear market, you do not want to be holding these things. Make sure you have clear goals that you're taking profits on the way up and you actually make the most of these. These narratives that run hot because the narratives will switch, they'll come and go. And meme coins are the shortest of a narrative to come and go. These assets change so quickly and with the amount of new coins coming in, you just need to be aware of that. So again, my three picks for my meme coins and that I've got in my portfolio, pepe with and popcat, understand that 98% of these meme coins fail. The further you go down the list, the more risks there are. So just be aware of that when you're investing, don't go all in. Make sure you take profits. Use the checklist that I, you know, I shared with you to try and understand which assets are going to be good or not. But remember, sometimes none of that matters and it's just literally the dumb of the thing, the more it's going to go up. And I know that sounds stupid, but that is the game we're playing. Remember, we're in a market. There's winners and losers. We're not in some AI game. There's no algorithm to tell you what wins and what loses. It is you versus the other person on the screen. So just be aware of that. When investing, try and minimize your energy. If you're busy in your time point, you've got stuff going on, have your degen bag play the long term. Be aware though that these things don't last forever and you don't want to hold into a bear market. Hopefully you enjoyed this video. If you want more tips and information, you can subscribe to my YouTube channel. I do videos like this to help you educate and nail this bull market. Hit the subscribe button or leave me a comment if you want to see another video and I'll see you on the next episode.