Key takeaways:

• Generic memecoins (eg. cat photo) lacking niche community have faster short-term adoption but struggle with long-term growth.

• Political-themed memecoins have fastest short-term growth though are too polarising for mainstream adoption.

Memecoins, driven by social media sentiment and cultural narratives, are largely understudied with most research focused on market dynamics overlooking the community-driven forces behind their growth.

A study by The Chinese University of Hong Kong collected a dataset of all 3,751 memecoins that migrated to Raydium between January and November 2024.

Using the framework below they clustered their dataset into three groups (clusters).

After clustering, memecoin descriptions were visualised in a word cloud with prominent words appearing larger.

The infographic below helps uncover key narratives and cultural motifs across the datatset which the study later compares to market capitalisation (cap) to see which cluster performs better financially.

The words "community" & "world" are prominent across all three groups highlighting the importance of community engagement as a driving factor for the success of memecoins.

The study concludes that cluster 0 has the highest market cap potential but the slowest market entry time which could be attributed to the fact that the two largest memecoins (DOGE & SHIB) fall into this category.

Market Entry Time: How quickly a token gains traction calculated by liquidity.

Cluster 1 shows the lowest market cap though a faster entry time than cluster 0 indicating a wider general appeal though a lack of a niche community identity to build for long-term growth.

Finally cluster 2 shows the fastest entry time attributed to the fast nature of current affairs and political developments though its content may be too polarising for mainstream adoption.

The official dataset can be found here.