The token’s rally highlights an ongoing debate over memecoin fundamentals and speculation.
Memecore (M) jumped as much as 19% on Tuesday, Feb. 17, making it one of the crypto market’s top performers on the day – but experts aren’t sold on the token’s lofty valuation.
MemeCore, launched in 2025, is a Layer 1 blockchain designed to connect creators and communities through meme-native applications and decentralized apps (dApps). The token traded as high as $1.59 on Tuesday, but has since retraced to $1.45, down 3.5% over the past 24 hours.
The token’s market capitalization currently stands near $2.5 billion, while its fully diluted valuation is about $7.7 billion – down from $8.11 billion a day earlier, according to CoinGecko.
While the price surge signalled momentum at first glance, analysts told The Defiant it actually underscores deeper structural concerns around valuation and liquidity.
“I wouldn’t waste a single Gwei on MemeCore,” said Danny Nelson, a research analyst at Bitwise. “This token’s soaring $2 billion valuation is divorced from the reality of memecoin economics.”
He explained that across the competitive landscape, pumpfun printed $8.6 million in revenue over the past week. “It has a valuation of $800 million; meanwhile, MemeCore generated $10 in transaction fees over the same period,” Nelson said. “I don’t see how MemeCore could be worth 2.5 times as much as Pump.Fun.”
MemeCore did not respond to The Defiant’s request for comment.
This criticism also extended to the broader mechanics behind meme token rallies, according to Brian Huang, co-founder of Glider.
“It’s no surprise that Memes consistently make up the top gainers: low liquidity means traders can manipulate the price without needing large amounts of capital,” said Huang. “Compare that to trading a stock like NVDA, which would require hundreds of millions of dollars to move the price significantly.”
Huang added that meme tokens, in general, pose significant risks to retail investors. “Marketing is always highlighting winners with +10,000% gains, when in reality the vast majority of traders lose money,” he said. “As an industry, we should be focused on building products that grow the wealth of on-chain users.”
Huang also warned that many traders underestimate the competitive landscape, failing to recognize that they are trading against industrialized trading firms.
“The odds are against these traders,” Huang emphasized. “The broader problem with memes is that they conflate investing with gambling. Retail users cannot distinguish between real investable assets (like BTC, ETH, and SOL) and memes. They are all presented the same way to these users.”
The memecoin sector currently boasts a market capitalization of around $35.9 billion, down about 0.3% over the past 24 hours.
Source: https://thedefiant.io/news/markets/memecore-rally-prompts-criticism-over-valuation
