Today, meme coins now make up less than 15% of daily volume on Solana DEXs and the popular “hot take” is that the meme coin era is over. That take is lazy and wrong. It is wrong because it assumes meme coins were only ever about jokes, luck or “financial nihilism.” They were not. Meme coins were the first large-scale experiment in turning attention itself into a permissionless, tradeable asset. This market exists for a simple reason: blockchains made it trivial for anyone to create, authenticate and exchange digital value without permission. Once that door opened, it was inevitable that attention - the most valuable resource in the Internet age - would be next. We already live in an attention-based society. What most people underestimate is how large the attention economy has become. Culture, memes, narratives and identity now move markets faster than balance sheets ever could. Before crypto, attention could only be monetized by platforms, brands and a small group of influencers. Everyone else generated value and gave it away for free. Likes, trends, inside jokes and communities created massive economic value but almost none of that value flowed back to participants. Meme coins broke that model. They democratized the financialization of attention. They turned social consensus into something liquid. They gave communities a way to express belief, momentum and identity as a market.  What looks irrational through a traditional finance lens is perfectly coherent through a cultural one. This is why the Solana volume stat is misleading. Yes, meme coin volume is down. That is real. But the conclusion people draw from it is backward. What is declining is not attention monetization rather it is a specific, exhausted implementation of it. And, we have seen this pattern before with early social platforms. The first wave of social media was loud, chaotic and extractive. Engagement farming, spam, vanity metrics and shallow incentives dominated. Users burned out, growth plateaued and critics declared the model broken. What actually happened following this "death" was evolution: the mechanism survived while its noisiest expressions of it were removed. Meme coins are entering the same phase. This is not a rejection of attention-based markets. It is what happens when friction drops to zero and extraction overwhelms “signal.” Volume falls, participants burn out and the market evolves. And here is the part most people are missing: attention markets never come back looking the same! The next version will not look like today’s meme coins. It may not even be called a meme coin. It will reward sustained contribution, coordination and cultural signal; not just speed and spectacle. However, the bigger point is that this shift is irreversible. Individuals will increasingly capture value from the attention they generate and coordinate with one another directly. Platforms, brands and influencers do not disappear either but their monopoly on monetization does. The meme coin era is not over. It just stopped being loud.