Author: Michael Nadeau, The DeFi Report; Translator: 0xxz@Jinse Finance
Before we officially start this article, let's briefly understand the background.
Our analysis and research show that meme coins have relatively high L1 asset properties (and are more likely to outperform L1).
We believe that meme coins are leveraged bets on various themes/narratives and ecosystems.
We are only interested in meme coins that have already achieved a certain escape velocity. This eliminates 99% of the market share - we will focus on blue-chip meme coins with sufficient liquidity. (Note: This article was published before the TRUMP release)
By the way, I remember watching an interview with Paul Tudor Jones in 2020. He mainly talked about Bitcoin. He mentioned that Stanley Druckenmiller told him that 80% of Bitcoin holders held Bitcoin at a price from $20,000 all the way down to $3,000 (after the 2017 cycle). This is an interesting data point. This gave Paul Tudor Jones the conviction to invest in Bitcoin. When analyzing meme coins and wallet groups, we are looking for similar obvious data.
But please remember, meme coins are very risky and volatile.
Please only invest what you are willing to lose, and always do your own research.
Let's look at the data...
1. Token Holder Growth
Summary:
SPX6900 is the only meme coin where the growth rate of $1,000+ holders exceeds its overall holder growth rate.
Note that many assets have seen price declines in the past 30 days, which may distort the data. Fartcoin (up 94%), AI16z (up 81%), and SPX6900 (up 52%) were the best performing assets last month.
GIGA is an outlier in the data, as its price has remained flat over the past 30 days, but it still managed to maintain growth in its $1,000+ holders.
2. Token Holding Conviction
(1) Average and Median Holding
Summary:
SPX6900 stands out again, as its median holding across all Ethereum addresses is 369% higher than Pepe, which ranks second in median holding per wallet among meme coins. Its average balance is also the highest.
The SPX6900 on Solana, however, has a different story, as its median holding is only 25% of what we see on Ethereum. This is consistent with the market's perception of the two networks: Ethereum tends to attract more TVL and higher-value transactions than Solana.
Based Brett on Base L2 is the most "gamified" meme. We're looking into what happened, but from the chart below, we can see that the token holders have had three significant spikes in growth. Insiders seem to have airdropped tens of thousands of wallets to promote marketing/community building. This is not new, the Bonk team has done this before (including airdrops to Solana phone buyers).
Generally, we can see that most meme coin "investors" are operating in the hundreds of dollars range - likely investing in multiple projects.
Again, SPX6900 stands out on Ethereum, as its community seems to have more conviction than any other meme.
(2) $1,000+ Investors
Summary:
Again, SPX6900 is drawing attention. 36% of its users hold over $1,000, compared to an average of only 14.2% for $1,000+ holders in other popular memes.
Pepe stands out among the "big meme" with 18% of wallets holding over $1,000.
The top five also include Fartcoin, AI16z, and MOG.
(3) $100,000+ Investors
Summary:
SPX6900 tops the leaderboard again, with the highest percentage of wallets holding over $100,000. Some may see this as a bad thing, as it suggests that large holders could "dump" on retail. I think the opposite is true. In my view, the higher the percentage of wallets holding over $100,000, the more confidence people have in that asset. In some ways, SPX6900 may be forming BTC-like properties within the meme space.
Fartcoin and AI16z (both on Solana) have shown remarkable $100,000+ holding wallet counts.
(4) Sub-$100 Wallet Percentage
Summary:
SPX6900 has more $1,000+ (12,914) wallets on Ethereum, while having relatively fewer sub-$100 (9,920) wallets. This is an anomalous data point. By this metric, no other meme comes close. In fact, only 29% of SPX wallets on Ethereum hold less than $100. Pepe ranks second, with 43% of wallets holding under $100.
For reference: Pepe (the second-largest asset in this category) has 7.6 $1,000+ wallets and 179,000 sub-$100 wallets.
You'll see the bottom 4 assets have a highly concentrated sub-$100 wallet count. We believe these are more centralized meme coins, with insider marketing campaigns and airdrops - which has given this category of data this appearance.
3. Whale Growth
30-Day Growth Rate of Whale Wallets
Summary:
Fartcoin and AI16z rank near the top, which is a bit surprising. These two assets were launched in October last year and have seen significant growth in the past 30 days. Given that their prices have increased by 94% and 81% respectively during this period, the growth in $100,000+ wallets is not unreasonable. But these two assets are quite volatile, so the fact that we seem to have a fair number of holders showing high conviction is a very interesting phenomenon.
Over the past month, Bonk has declined 14%, but its $100,000+ wallet count has dropped 69%, suggesting many large holders may have recently taken profits. This could put Bonk's bottom price in the 0.000026 USD - 0.000028 USD range.
4. Whale Retention Rate
The purpose of this metric is to look at all wallets that held over $100,000 at some point in the asset's lifecycle. We then compared that number to the wallets still holding over $100,000. We believe this metric gives us some insight into the long-term conviction of the large holders.
*Please note that our current data set is missing some large Ethereum meme coins. We will share the data as soon as we get it.
Summary:
SPX6900 exceeds expectations in this regard. 86% of wallets that once held over $100,000 in tokens still maintain at least that holding level, even though the token price is currently 34% below its all-time high. This could be described as fanatical behavior.
5. Internal Transactions
Our focus here is to identify tokens with obvious "conspiracy" characteristics. To this end, we looked at the total number of wallets that received tokens in the first week after issuance. Then, we filtered out the "internal wallets" based on the condition of "wallets that received tokens but had less than 5 transactions before."
The logic is that crypto users who received tokens in the first week and had less than 5 transactions are unlikely to be non-internal wallets.
Summary:
Among the 5 assets we were able to obtain data for, SPX topped the list again.
Pepe had a large number of token recipients (45,000) in the first week, with a high proportion of "insiders."
Based Brett has 55% of the internal wallets, which is not surprising to us. Among all the memes we analyzed, this token seems to have the highest degree of centralized management.
6. Conclusion
I want to make it clear that we are still in the early stages of gaining insights through data collection. Please note that some data may be noisy (note that asset prices may distort some indicators).
We believe that by analyzing wallet groups, we can learn a lot.
So, what have we learned?
SPX6900 ranked first in 6 out of 9 data sets. It ranked second in one data set. Its 30-day growth rate of whale wallets ranked third. This gives it an overall score of 9.
The second-ranked asset in terms of overall score is AI16z with a total of 21 points.
Fartcoin ranks third with a total score of 28.
Finally, I also want to say:
Please note that there are different ways to view and interpret the data. You might say that the fact that most holders still hold their tokens is a bad thing. You might say the proportion of holders with less than $100 should be higher. I don't think so, I think the higher the proportion of wallets holding large amounts of tokens, the more confidence it shows. But you can question my interpretation of this data and put forward your own views.
Our data is limited to on-chain data and does not include centralized exchange data. WIF, Bonk, Shiba Inu, Pepe, and GIGA are traded on platforms like Binance and Coinbase.
Assuming we did not include SPX6900 tokens on Base in our data set. As far as we know, there seems to have been some airdrop event(s) that distorted the data, so we just removed it. That token has 72,012 wallets, but only 1,929 wallets (2.6%) hold more than $1,000. The median balance is $0.000001. The real activity of SPX6900 is on Ethereum and Solana.
The conclusions we have drawn do not mean that these assets will perform well in the future. In fact, if BTC performs poorly in the coming months, I expect these assets will not perform well either.
But if you believe that BTC will perform well in the coming months, it may be wise to form a data-driven perspective on the "blue-chip memes" for 2025. These data sets can help you do that.
