The meme-filled summer is being declared over.

From the collapse of the Trump family's $TRUMP to the exposure of the $Libra scam at the Argentine president's rally, Solana, which sees meme as the core driver of on-chain transactions, has seen its on-chain transaction volume halved and the daily issuance of new coins reduced by 70%. The top meme coins have fallen more than 70% year-to-date... All signs indicate that the meme bubble, with a total market cap of nearly $60 billion, is also starting to show cracks.

Bitwise Chief Investment Officer Matt Hougan, Dragonfly Managing Partner Haseeb Qureshi, and Castle Island Ventures Partner Nic Carter, among other investors, have recently published views shorting the meme market.

"I still can't lie flat, I have to do something," Philo said in an interview with ChainCatcher. Philo, who calls himself "P Xiaojun," recently publicly stated that he had successfully landed and liquidated all his meme assets, but he couldn't lie flat during the time he should have been lying flat. Philo told the ChainCatcher reporter that he has decided to start a business next, building a platform to short Memecoin.

This decision means that Philo is shedding the identity of "P Xiaojun" and undergoing an identity transformation. Philo's transformation is a microcosm of the thousands and thousands of P Xiaojuns in the context of the sudden cooling of the Memecoin market.

Meme coins encounter "Waterloo", P Xiaojuns reach a crossroads

According to GoogleTrends, the global search heat for "Memecoin" has plummeted after reaching a peak in January, shrinking by nearly 60% by the end of February. Coingecko statistics show that the overall decline of the meme sector in the past 7 days ranks among the top 10 worst-performing assets in the entire crypto market, with well-known meme coins like TRUMP and MELANIA down more than 70% year-to-date, and even blue-chip meme coins like DOGE and SHIB recording negative returns.

The secondary market performance of memes is bleak, and the on-chain market is also in a slump. DuneAnalytics shows that the daily trading volume of the meme coin issuance platform pump.fun plummeted from $390 million on January 24 to $134 million in February, a drop of 64.83%; the number of newly issued tokens fell from 61,800 per day to less than 30,000, a drop of more than 50%.

Faced with the meme recession, Bitwise Chief Investment Officer Matt Hougan publicly stated: "...Over the past year, meme coins have been the hottest sector outside of Bitcoin in the crypto currency space. Removing meme coin activity from the crypto ecosystem will have an impact, and that's what you're seeing today."

Philo was once a "P Xiaojun" in the wave of meme coin wealth creation, and at this point he has chosen to retreat from the tide. But few would have imagined that this young man who seized the meme opportunity is only a senior in college, and due to his obsession with researching cryptocurrencies, he "voluntarily" gave up his studies - he just received a withdrawal notice.

"I was not in school most of the time, so I received a withdrawal notice. Going to college, the future is just to find a job, but my actual experience tells me that it is easier to achieve the goal of making money in the Crypto circle - you may be able to earn in one year what it takes most people decades or even a lifetime to earn," Philo told the ChainCatcher reporter.

Philo's experience is full of drama. As a civil engineering student, he taught himself programming as a hobby. In fact, Philo openly stated that in the past few cycles, he has seized opportunities in DeFi and NFT, and is most satisfied with earning money through his GitHub account, which made him realize "this is a high-profit business with no cost", so he has gone further and further down the path of programming and cryptocurrencies, and he says he has won several hackathon awards.

However, this time the gold mine he dug up in the meme coin wave made him feel he could take a break for a while.

Why choose to shed the identity of "P Xiaojun" at this time? Philo said it was his instinct that told him to do so, "I have investment experience and entrepreneurial experience, and my experience tells me that in both investment and entrepreneurship, not only technology and vision, but luck also accounts for a large part."

Shedding the identity of "P Xiaojun" has made Philo's life calmer for a while, "The sense of comfort, happiness and security have all improved." But after less than half a month, Philo couldn't sit still, and he turned his sights to entrepreneurship, saying he is developing two projects, one is a Bitcoin stablecoin, and the other is a platform to short Memecoin, "I think shorting Memecoin is an opportunity, there are a lot of platforms in the market now that help Memecoin longs make money, but there is still a lack of opportunities for shorts to make money." For me, entrepreneurship is about whether it is something I want to do and the positive impact on the industry, rather than just profit. Even if I lose money on entrepreneurship, it's still giving back to the market.

Some P Xiaojuns have chosen to exit at this time, but some have also chosen to hold their ground and upgrade to P Marshals. Memecoin KOL @YuYue told ChainCatcher in an interview that her life hasn't changed much, "but I will put more focus on life, looking at more new projects, and making friends. In the future market, I will still actively follow the Meme track and various emerging on-chain Alphas, because this form of asset issuance has already transcended the cultural concept of Meme and exists, so I am very optimistic about the future on-chain assets and on-chain Meme continuing to have more opportunities, and I will act accordingly when the time is right."

The Davis Double Whammy Crisis: Bubble Burst and Solana Sell-off

P Xiaojuns have reached a crossroads and made different choices, which is related to their judgment of the future market.

Although the data shows that Memecoin is starting to cool down, Yuyue does not believe that the Meme track story is over.

"I think this change is a natural phenomenon, but it doesn't mean the 'tide is going out' or the track is over. In fact, the meme frenzy has basically lasted for more than a year, from the meme coins like WIF and BOME last year, it has been more than a year, and this cycle and vitality have far exceeded all other sub-tracks, so the entire meme track is in a mood trough, which I think is a normal phenomenon," she said in the interview.

Over the past period of time, the out-of-circle effect of meme coins has mainly relied on celebrity coins. Because celebrity coins often have a certain fan base and stronger topicality, celebrity meme coins are more likely to become popular. But success and failure are both due to Xiao He. Meme was pushed to a high point by celebrity coins, and was also criticized because of celebrity coins. Events like the collapse of the Trump family's TRUMP and the Libra scam have accelerated the collapse of market confidence in Memecoin.

Treeverse founder Loopify publicly stated: "Meme coins are like NFTs in the last bull market, with only bubbles left after the tide goes out." Taking TRUMP tokens as an example, their market value once soared to $70 billion, but the lack of real use cases was exposed, and the price quickly returned to zero.

In this wave of celebrity Memecoins, Meme also seems to have lost its original intention. Initially, retail investors were keen on playing Meme largely to fight against VC Coins, but today, retail investors are still the injured party.

Dragonfly Managing Partner Haseeb Qureshi said in a recent podcast: "People seem to realize the essence of the Meme promoters and how the massive Meme coin issuance game is detrimental to retail investors... People are becoming skeptical about how Meme coins operate, and it's uncertain whether retail investors can continue to participate in this so-called 'casino'."

A leader of the Memecoin research community told ChainCatcher: "The new retail investors have basically been cut."

In addition to the meme bubble beginning to dissipate, the market is gradually shifting towards more conservative asset attributes, putting meme coins in a situation similar to the "Davis Double Whammy". Since January 2025, the net inflow of Bitcoin ETF funds has reached $43 billion, while the capital outflow of Solana, the main battlefield of meme coins, has exceeded $12 billion during the same period. Furthermore, Solana will face the pressure of unlocking 112 million SOL on March 1, which were sold at a low price of 30%-40% of the market price to institutions by the FTX bankruptcy liquidation assets, and the market is worried that the unlocking will trigger a sell-off, and the decline in Solana's price will further drag down the prices of the meme coins that use it as the main battlefield.

However, YuYue pointed out to ChainCatcher that "in fact, the overall environment of other tracks, including the ecosystems of various public chains, DeFi, etc., are not so optimistic. The core reason for the market downturn is still liquidity, which is a problem facing all tracks and ecosystems in the crypto circle."

The Second Half of the Meme Player's Journey: Either Hustle or Pivot

Where will the Meme players go in the second half of their journey?

On February 19, during the Consensus HK event, a roundtable discussion titled "Trends and Rhythms of the New Web3 Cycle" was hosted by RootDtata and ChainCatcher. Participants included Kyle, partner at Cooking.city & co-founder of EVG, 0xbing, investor at Paper Venture, crypto KOL YuYue, Vand Ni, founder of Asian on chain, and Leo Li, OKX Web3 product manager. They discussed the "Progression Path of Meme and P-Coin Players", and shared their outlook on the future of Meme.

There was a consensus that the second half of the Meme journey will be a more intense and challenging PVP battlefield. YuYue believes that Meme may have a longer lifespan than most narratives, forcing the market to rethink its valuation system. The second half will be a more brutal PVP battlefield, and everyone needs to find their own positioning. Leo Li thinks it's necessary to reduce trading frequency, as the high-frequency PVP is too challenging for many ordinary players.

Meme has also spawned some other gameplay. For example, Time.fun tokenizes "time", Monsters.fun integrates AI agents and game economics, and Nad.fun introduces anti-MEV mechanisms and social credit airdrops, all joining the exploration of Meme 2.0.

However, just like the once-glorious narratives in the market, there was no DeFi 2.0 after the DeFi Summer, and no Meme 2.0 after the Meme winter. The new narratives captured by the market may emerge in other areas.

The chain is not just about Meme and celebrity coins. According to Dune data, since the beginning of the year, the narratives of Derivatives, FriendTech, and RWA have started to outperform the broader market.

Behind these three narratives is the pace of institutional capital entering the market.

RWA, as a trillion-dollar track under the compliance wave, has already attracted large institutions in the past year. DefiLlama data shows that the RWA sector's TVL (Total Value Locked) broke through $80 billion in Q1 2025, a 300% year-over-year increase. Traditional institutions like BlackRock and Fidelity have entered the field, and the US Congress' stablecoin bill will further drive the compliance process.

The DeFi market has shown signs of recovery since the beginning of this year. According to Messari's report, although the trading volume and TVL of the DeFi market will decline in 2024, the liquidity remains strong in early 2025, showing the market's resilience. For example, Plume Network attracted over $4.5 billion in asset commitments before launch, with a TVL of $64 million; Uniswap V3 continued to lead the DEX market in early 2025, accounting for over 40% of market share; the TVL of lending platforms like Aave and Compound also rebounded, especially Aave's expansion on Polygon, increasing its TVL from $6 billion to $12 billion.

It's worth noting that Coinbase's BTC-backed loan product has attracted more mainstream users to the DeFi space. In addition, the integration of RWA is also seen as an important growth point for the DeFi market, such as Tradable's collaboration with ZKsync to bring $1.7 billion in credit assets on-chain.