A Midsummer Meme's Dream: Investigating Market Manipulations in the Meme Coin Ecosystem

From viral jokes to a billion-dollar phenomenon, meme coins have become one of the most popular segments in cryptocurrency markets. Unlike utility-focused crypto assets like Bitcoin or Ethereum, meme coins derive value primarily from community sentiment, making them vulnerable to manipulation. This study presents a cross-chain analysis of the meme coin ecosystem, examining 34,988 tokens across Ethereum, BNB Smart Chain, Solana, and Base. We characterize the tokenomics of meme coins and track their growth in a three-month longitudinal analysis. We discover that among high-return tokens (>100%), an alarming 82.6% show evidence of extensive use of artificial growth strategies designed to create a misleading appearance of market interest. These include wash trading and a form of manipulation we define as Liquidity Pool-Based Price Inflation (LPI), where small strategic purchases trigger dramatic price increases. We also find evidence of schemes designed to profit at the expense of investors, such as pump and dumps and rug pulls. In particular, most of the tokens involved had previously experienced wash trading or LPI, indicating how initial manipulations often set the stage for later exploitation. These findings reveal that manipulations are widespread among high-performing meme coins and suggest that their dramatic gains are often likely driven by coordinated efforts rather than natural market dynamics.