What the Charts Tells Us About Solana's Turbulent Memecoin Market

Fuelled by euphoric price surges and pump.fun’s explosive success, Solana memecoin traders were convinced they were destined for the fabled memecoin supercycle.

However, with uncertainty creeping back into the meme economy, it appears that the music might be stopping at last. 

Solana Memecoins Down Bad

Liquidity in the Solana ecosystem is becoming unsustainably fragmented. Based on Solscan data over 10,000 new SPL tokens are created every day, with the vast majority launching through pump.fun, a popular no-code token creation platform.

Over the past month, Solana’s iconic memecoins have suffered dramatic price drops across the board. With liquidity and attention fractured wider than ever before, many Solana memecoins have struggled to retain bullish sentiment.

Most of Solana’s biggest memecoins have witnessed double-digit percentage losses on both weekly and monthly timeframes. dogwifhat ($WIF), a cornerstone of Solana’s meme economy, is down 44.71% over the last 30D, dropping from $2.46 to exchange hands at $1.36, based on Step Finance data at press time.

Having nine lives hasn’t spared Solana’s favorite cats either. Once crowned the king of crypto cats, Popcat ($POPCAT) has plummeted from $0.82 to trade at $0.38, suffering a 53.65% loss on a monthly timeframe.

Opening a wider lens, it’s evident that Solana’s meme economy is struggling. Based on data provided by Coingecko, the bulk of Solana memecoins are enduring double-digit price drops, while the wider cryptocurrency markets continue to move sideways.

The vacuum of Solana’s meme coin activity may also be due to the launch of Tron’s SunPump, a pump.fun clone endorsed by crypto billionaire Justin Sun.

Orca Flips Raydium in DEX Volume

Highlighting the wavering sentiment around memecoins, Solana DEX trading volume is slowly but surely returning to Orca. Based on DeFiLlama data, Orca has flipped Raydium in weekly trading volume to reclaim its position as Solana’s DEX of choice.

While Raydium regained market share following its automatic integration of successfully launched pump.fun coins, Orca’s capital-efficient CLMM liquidity pools typically offer better trading conditions, making it a more popular exchange for Solana ecosystem projects to host their liquidity.

The majority of Solana’s DEX trading volume returning to Orca indicates that traders are more interested in trading established ecosystem assets. This serves as a direct contrast to recent months, when Raydium dominated market share due to the popularity of pump.fun-launched coins.

Are pump.fun Traders Profitable?

Adding more fuel to the fire, recent data analysis shared on social media has sparked fierce debate regarding the profitability of pump.fun traders. A profitability leaderboard created by Adam suggested that ~60% of pump.fun traders were losing money on the platform.

According to the data, traders that secured over $1,000 in profits were outperforming 97% of pump.fun participants, suggesting that odds were heavily skewed against traders.

Refuting and discrediting Adam’s claims, pump.fun co-founder alon asserted “the data he [Adam] used is so bad that the results are basically meaningless”, highlighting that the data didn’t account for unrealized profit and loss or bot transactions.

Reinforcing some of the gaps in the findings, reputable data analyst ilemi proposed numerous fixes that might allow for more accurate, reliable results.

While falling prices and dwindling volumes indicate that Solana’s meme economy is beginning to implode, the trenches remain hopeful. Memecoins are notoriously volatile assets that typically follow wider market dynamics. 

If bullish sentiment returns to higher-cap markets, memecoins might prove naysayers wrong and bounce back to life more emphatically than established assets.

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