Meme coins slump and tempers flare as one controversial platform defies the trend, raking in millions despite widespread criticism.
TL;DR
- The meme coin market remains in a slump
- Top meme coins all took a hit, dropping as much as 38% in a week
- Pump.fun is making bank ($5.3m in a day!), but people are sick of all the failed token launches.
- New platforms for meme coin shorting launch
- Big crypto events coming up in Singapore next month might shake things up?
7-Day Meme Coin Market Snapshot
According to our calculations, the total meme coin market cap is up from $35.9 billion to $36.7 billion. However, meme coin prices have continued to slide after last week’s post-Black Monday recovery, and the overall trend remains bearish over the last 30 days, down from $56 billion on the 22nd of July.
Meme Coin Market vs Other Crypto Sectors
According to DeFiLlama’s Narrative tracker, the meme coin sector’s mCap-weighted category performed the third-worst with a 10.85 dip the last week.
Here’s the 30-day performance:
Source: DeFiLlama.com
The biggest meme coins showed a highly correlated movement, crashing hard on 5 August’s Black Monday collapse before recovering sharply and then trending sideways the last 7 days.
Top 20 Meme Coin Leaderboard
Source: CMC Meme Coins Page
Meme Coin Top 10: 7-day Insights
Before I dig into the data, a quick caveat: We had a strong recovery a week ago after the 5 August meltdown. Compared to that, we’re still up (I think?).
However, for the period Aug 8-15, it’s bloody:
- Rough week all around: Meme coins took a beating across the board. Every single one in our top 10 list is in the red.
- Some bruised, some battered: We're seeing drops anywhere from 4% to a whopping 38%.
- Big dogs hold their ground (sort of): Dogecoin and Shiba Inu, the heavyweights of meme coins, are down 5%. Not great, but they're weathering the storm better than most.
- Underdogs (get it) feeling the pain: Some of the smaller coins like WIF and POPCAT got hit hard, down 22% and 25%.
- Middle of the pack staying together: Most mid-sized coins are down 12-15%.
- Disconnect with YTD: Despite strong YTD performances, the universal negative 7-day trend is concerning.
Biggest Meme Coin News This Week
- Pump.fun makes changes after criticism, hits record revenue again
- Firms launch meme coin shorting protocols
- HamsterKombat delays “crypto’s biggest ever” airdrop due to overwhelming demand
- Popcat is this week’s top gainer
- Blast’s largest meme coin Pacmoon migrates to Solana, rebrands as $ARMY
- Polymarket: Pepe will hit a $10b market cap before WIF
PvP- The People vs Pump.Fun?
Meme coins got you feeling murderously entertained after watching (to paraphrase DJT), “millions and millions and millions” of new tokens launch and break like Raygun during the Trump Elon debate?
Here’s how Pump.fun saw it:
Jeez, read the room intern…
Industry: Pump.Fun! J'Accuse...!
Pump.fun was first praised for driving up activity and the SOL price, but is now becoming despised for churning out 98.5% failed launches, 1.6 million of them to date, and collecting gazillions in fees, more than the whole Ethereum network, for its efforts.
Here are a couple of salty X.com gems:
“Meme coins have made me low-key hate cats and dogs” - me
Pump.fun Rings In The Changes
Probably nervous about dodging users at next month’s Solana Breakpoint conference, Pump.fun is trying to shake things up, with new features aimed at ensuring developers stick with their projects.
- The token creation fee is now free, with the $2 fee passed to the first buyer.
- If a token reaches a $69k market cap and migrates to Raydium, the developer gets a 0.5 SOL reward, paid from the reduced migration fee of 1.5 SOL.
- These changes aim to cut down on scams and encourage developers to support their projects.
FYI, on 14 August Pump.fun hit a new ATH record for fees in the last 24 hours, collecting a cool $5.3m in fees, according to Coindesk.
That’s more than double the next biggest platform, Ethereum’s Lido ($2.3m)
Eat Meme Shorts, Says Haters
Following in the footsteps of Save Finance’s dumpy.fun, Margin.Fi has a new antidote: meme coin shorting. Called The Arena, this tool lets traders profit from the volatility of meme coins by betting against the hype. The Arena leverages isolated lending pools, to remove the risk of impermanent loss associated with AMMs.
Alon, the co-founder of Pump.fun, has dropped hints that the SOL black hole creators are considering creating a similar mechanism, and possibly a Hot Tub Time Machine, to undo all their carnage. Ok, I made that last bit up.
What You Can Do:
Probably nothing. We all know meme coins run best when crypto market arrows point up, and the summer holiday periods of July and August are usually bearish and boring.
Crypto Twitter is dead at the moment and even meme coin messiah Ansem is currently keeping himself entertained by creating a tier list for his favorite vegetables. I kid you not.
Token2049, Solana Breakpoint and MemeCon all descend on Singapore middle of next month, and who knows, maybe memes could be the talk of the town by that time.
Happy trading out there and save your SOL if you can. Till next week!
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