Since April, over a million new crypto tokens launched

More than a million new tokens have been created since the beginning of April, with over 370,000 new tokens appearing on Ethereum, while more than 640,000 new tokens, primarily meme tokens, have been launched on Solana.

As of April 1, 372,642 new tokens were launched on the Ethereum blockchain, of which 88 percent were launched on Coinbase’s layer-2 blockchain Base.

Coinbase Director Conor Grogan noted a similar figure, stating that this is double the number of tokens created on Ethereum between 2015 and 2023.

The total value locked (TVL) on Base has increased by about 630 percent since the beginning of 2024, according to L2beat, primarily driven by a widespread craze for meme tokens.

Meanwhile, 643,227 new tokens were created on Solana in the same timeframe, according to data from the analytics platform Step Finance.

Of the total 643,000 new tokens launched on Solana, 466,914 were meme tokens, according to the Dune Analytics dashboard that tracks the number of new tokens launched on the meme token platform pump.fun on Solana.

CoinMarketCap lists the 500 most recent tokens added to its platform in the last 30 days, most of which are meme tokens.

The crypto analytics platform CoinGecko now has a meme category, which lists over 600 tokens with a total market capitalization of $52.7 billion, nearly half of Tether’s market capitalization.

Grogan’s announcement sparked a wave of negative responses from the crypto community, with many arguing that meme tokens are detrimental to the crypto industry and its image.

One commentator called it ‘net negative’ due to the proliferation of scams and rug pulls.

Others labeled the sudden increase in new meme tokens as ‘sniper bots’ designed to automatically launch new meme tokens in hopes of hitting a breakthrough.

In April, a Cointelegraph study revealed that one in six new Base meme tokens was a scam, and over 90 percent had vulnerabilities.

Despite the backlash directed at them, meme tokens were the most profitable crypto narrative in the first quarter, as reported by Cointelegraph in April.