Pump's bullet hits the forehead
Just now, Pump.fun co-founder alon posted that the official X account of Pump.fun was hacked and a fraudulent token "PUMP" was issued, reminding users to be aware of the risks.
As the most active meme coin launch platform in the Solana ecosystem, Pump.fun has once become the wealth creation myth of retail investors with its "internal incubation + external explosion" two-stage mechanism. The token first accumulates liquidity through the Bonding Curve mechanism on the platform, and when the trading volume breaks through the $69,000 threshold, it automatically migrates to the leading DEX Raydium to establish a liquidity pool, completing the closed loop from project launch to market speculation. This meticulously designed set of rules went into crazy operation in 2024:
From April 1 last year to now, the tokens launched by Pump.fun have contributed $346 billion in trading volume to Raydium, accounting for half of the total flow of that DEX, and of the $197 million in fees collected by the platform, $104 million came from Pump.fun's transactions.
However, when celebrities like Trump entered the field with "flash-in-the-pan" tokens (such as TRUMP, MELANIA), this game of passing the drum began to expose its naked harvesting logic. On-chain data shows that more than 70% of meme coins showed a "pool building is the peak" trend in the external market stage, with an average lifespan of less than 48 hours.
More dangerous signals come from the full ebb of liquidity. On February 24, only 1 of the tokens graduated from Pump.fun had a market capitalization barely exceeding $1 million, and the on-chain speculative fever was almost frozen. The trading depth of meme coins on Raydium has shrunk by more than 90% from its peak, and the on-chain stablecoin market capitalization on Solana has seen a net outflow of more than $1 billion in the past 30 days, the largest capital hemorrhage since the FTX collapse.
This collapse is not accidental. When the project party, trading platform and celebrities form a "harvesting iron triangle", when the mathematical model of Bonding Curve becomes a pump-and-dump tool, the confidence of retail investors has long been eroded in the repeated "open and dump" drama. The failure of Pump.fun is not only a microcosm of the liquidity crisis in the Solana ecosystem, but also a cruel interrogation of the entire crypto world on the meme narrative - when the bubble bursts and the carnival ends, who will clean up this capital wasteland?
SOL drops more than 50% from its high, the ecosystem is in a downturn
As one of the most eye-catching public chain tokens in 2024, Solana rode the wind of Pump and meme to march forward, rising nearly 200% for the whole year.
But since Trump launched a token on Solana on January 18, this wave seems to have finally been washed ashore: SOL's price first hit a new high of $295 on January 19, and then plummeted, with a drop of more than 50% at one point.
And with only 3 days left before the largest token unlock in Solana's history (worth $2 billion), 11.2 million SOL will be unlocked and circulated, most of which come from the FTX auction purchase at a cost of $64, which could also form a huge selling pressure.
In addition to the poor performance of the token price, according to Defillama's data, Solana's ecosystem TVL has dropped from a high of $12.19 billion to $7.22 billion today, and its daily transaction fee income is also declining.
Furthermore, the 24-hour net inflow data of the Solana ecosystem shows that only on January 18 and 19, $260 million flowed out, and the inflow of funds since then has been constantly decreasing, far less than the Pump era.
Not only that, other indicators are also not optimistic, the performance of Solana's mainstream protocol tokens in the past seven days also shows a declining trend:
Figure Rootdata on the performance of the Solana ecosystem
Overall, the ecosystem presents a scene of "when the tree falls, the monkeys scatter".
This also inevitably raises the question: Is Solana's story over?
Solana labs co-founder toly is also afraid of the collapse!
Faced with the risk of token price collapse, the Solana ecosystem is experiencing the greatest fear, uncertainty and FUD since the FTX meltdown. Analysts have estimated that during the entire meme coin speculation cycle, scammers have amassed over $10 billion.
Faced with the unavoidable reality problems, many community members have also responded.
As the co-founder of Solana labs, toly has always advocated for healthy technical development and innovation, and he has also repeatedly called on builders to return to innovation and build quality projects. Although he did not directly criticize, his conversations with other community members on X often revealed his dissatisfaction with Pump. Faced with the questioning of long-term supporters, he even responded "The assholes that mess with markets to max extract can go f』 themselves.", and the group he referred to is self-evident.
Crypto KOL@cobie has also repeatedly pointed out the problems of the PVP model. He said "The current market development trajectory is that market participants actively rush into these scams like moths, and most people know these are scams, but the goal is to sell to the bag holders at 3 times the price. They just want to get rich in 2 weeks, not 2-4 years. Players hope they can also win the big prize in the next action."
Of course, the community is also making attempts to save itself. Solana launched the SIMD-0228 proposal on February 26, setting a 50% target staking rate. If the staking rate exceeds 50%, the issuance will be reduced and the yield will be lowered; if it is less than 50%, the issuance will increase and the yield will rise. The minimum inflation rate is 0%, and the maximum inflation rate is determined based on the current issuance curve. This proposal aims to turn SOL issuance into a market-driven model.
In addition, the Solana spot ETF has become another lifeline - the Polymarket prediction platform data shows that the market believes the probability of approval before 2025 is as high as 85.4%, and the probability of passing by June has also risen to 34%. If it comes true, referring to the cumulative trillion-dollar capital suction effect of the Bitcoin ETF and the hundred-billion-dollar Ethereum ETF, Solana may welcome a capital injection of tens of billions of dollars.
Solana's predicament is not an isolated case, but a microcosm of the industry's "speculative backlash against innovation".
As KOL@0xNing0x summarized: "Now we have entered the settlement moment of this cycle, the P-kids are the MVPs, Solana, Pump.fun, Jupiter are the best supports, TRUMP is the lying dog, AI16Z is the lying dog, JLP holders are the lying dogs. The losers are Base and Virtual, Ethereum, Arbitrum, Optimism, ZkSync, Starknet are the mixed lane, mid, jungle and support."
At present, Solana's way out may only have two paths: either rely on external capital such as ETF to forcibly extend its life, but may deepen the path dependence on the financial casino; or as Toly advocates "scraping the bone to detoxify", enduring short-term pain to rebuild developer faith.
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