With this kind of moonshot potential, we’ve seen meme coins become the dominant crypto sector of 2025, providing returns more lucrative than any other sector in the crypto market. Nevertheless, against all odds, meme coins have surged. From January 1 to May 31, 2025, they maintained double-digit percentage gains, surpassing all other crypto sectors on the chart.

The meme coin sector achieved an average return of 33.08% over the course of the study. This stellar performance launched them as the only crypto sector to finish 2025 in the green.

Of all tracked sectors, meme coins had the highest return, states the study. Real World Assets (RWA), the second-best performing category on the metric, saw an average return of -7.95%.

Indeed, the returns from meme coins were considerably higher than other booming sectors. In fact, they were 117% higher than AI’s 8.69% and 207% higher than Layer 2’s 6.14%.

"While often dismissed unseriously as the ‘joke coins’ of crypto, memecoins are achieving something remarkable in 2025: outperforming every other market segment," - NFTEvening

The research additionally found that only 18.82% of meme projects were able to make their investors profitable. In 2025, more than 36,800 meme tokens were launching—and on average—every single day. January by itself was an astounding increase, with over 1.7 million new meme tokens launching in a single month!

Cryptocurrency memes were one of the ten largest overall crypto categories examined in terms of spending. Major focus areas of development RWA – real world assets L1 – layer 1 technologies. Also very exciting are Decentralized Exchanges (DEX), Lending, NFTs, GameFi, Restaking, AI and Layer 2 (L2).

The research conducted to analyze price performance among ten crypto categories including DeFi, gaming, and metaverse tokens used data from shopping rewards platform PumpFund and CoinGecko. Tokens with no trading activity or that were delisted during the study period were assigned a default return of -100%.

"A notable 18.82% of meme projects achieved profitability," - the study