I am not the first to raise this point, nor am I the one who waits until the dust settles to express an opinion, which would be seen as "hindsight". But I still want to make a bold judgment: I believe the Memecoins craze is over.

This round of Memecoins craze has basically come to an end. The existing coins may still have a chance to return to their historical highs, but it is unlikely that new coins will be able to surge to billions of dollars in market capitalization and sustain it. For mid-to-low market cap coins, the probability of a rebound is almost 0.1%.

You can mark the key moments that led to the imminent collapse of the Meme market from the chart: $TRUMP was the first coin to trigger the change, followed by $MELANIA, and then a series of other rug pulls, with $LIBRA being the last straw that broke the market's back.

The emergence of large-scale fraud and rug pulls is inevitable, just as platforms like pump.fun will inevitably appear in some form or another.

The market volatility has been excessive, from extreme rises (PvE memecoins reaching billions in market cap) to extreme scams (nation-level teams rug pulling). Most people either made money or suffered losses in this process.

There are no real holders

Regarding the Solana trenches, one thing is very important: it is entirely driven by market momentum. The vast majority of those buying these tokens are simply in it to make money, as the "narratives" in traditional crypto projects have lost their appeal. This also means that the price of these coins will drop faster than other coins.

The Memecoin craze has been touted as the purest form of trading, as it has no restrictions. This is also an important reason why they have been able to run so crazy. However, this "purity" also brings huge drawbacks.

Once the excitement of making money subsides, holders will quickly exit, and this same group will also completely abandon the market. This is different from other cryptocurrencies, whose holders usually still have faith in the project itself, as these projects at least have some actual value support, while Memecoins rely entirely on market sentiment and have almost no substantive content.

This also applies to a certain extent to , but are still different from Memecoins. Memecoins have completely abandoned the concept of "utility", and only a few have broken through the attention barrier and are to some extent considered "classic" or "eternal" by the market, such as $PEPE.

This round of Memecoin craze has also spawned some relatively new phenomena, such as follow trading. In the past, people would always track wallet behavior on the chain, but this time the influx of coins has reached unprecedented levels. The improved user experience (UX) and liquidity issues on have also made this phenomenon more popular.

However, there are now some people who have made hundreds of thousands of dollars through this model. They profit by attracting followers (this is not referring to a specific person, but a general phenomenon - those who have become famous for "making a lot of money" on public wallets often attract a large number of followers, and some even deliberately take advantage of this).

have long had follow trading functions, but in the past you could not, like now, buy a small coin with a market cap (MCAP) of only $10,000 with 5 and sell it for 10 15 seconds later.

This phenomenon has led to more people following the so-called KOLs into the "crematorium" (i.e. losses), but unlike in the past, this has not been widely criticized on social media, as these traders have not explicitly promoted or advertised certain tokens.

Comparison with NFTs

Remember the glory days of ? I use this comparison because it was the hot spot in the previous cycle, just as were the trend in 2017.

Almost everyone has heard of . This trend has not only been widely disseminated on the internet, but has also attracted countless A-list celebrities to launch their own projects (although most of these projects ended up being rug pulls). The market has reached hundreds of billions of dollars in trading volume, with the minimum price of some series even reaching six figures.

In that wave of hype, became the biggest winner, with over $1 billion in fee revenue alone - in comparison, the total trading volume of pumpfun was only about $500 million.

However, this Memecoin craze is significantly different from in one aspect: this time, many protocols have profited greatly from it.

@0xngmi: The total "extraction" revenue from the Memecoin craze on is as follows:

• Trading bots and applications: $1.09 billion
• pumpfun: $492 million
• Maximum Extractable Value (MEV): $1.5 billion to $2 billion
• Trump insiders: $500 million to $1 billion
• Other insiders: Unknown
• Automated Market Makers (AMMs): $0 to $2 billion
• Total: Over $3.6 billion to $6.6 billion

Even at the lowest estimate, this round of craze has "extracted" about $4 billion, which is definitely not a small amount. (After all, one of the most powerful people in the world launched a coin that surged to a $70 billion market cap in two days, which is no longer considered "early".)

In comparison, I roughly estimate that if market trading, royalties, and minting revenue are included, the total scale of is slightly lower than this figure.

This indicates that the meme coin craze has surpassed the trend of the previous cycle, and its strong liquidity makes the market adjustment faster.

Many members of the Solana community are sensitive to the term "extraction" (which is why I have deliberately put it in quotation marks) and compare it to traditional business models. But I don't think this comparison is appropriate.

In traditional business, for example, when I buy a game, I get entertainment value from it, and the company gets revenue, which is a positive-sum game.

You could say that in the cryptocurrency market, many behaviors are zero-sum games, but the original intention of many projects is to provide some real value.

However, pumpfun is a negative-sum game, it operates through a value extraction mechanism, similar to a casino, its main function is to create tokens without real value, and the core use of these tokens is just for speculation or gambling more profits (of course, this does not include projects that are not specifically aimed at Memecoins, such as Jup or Phantom, although these projects benefit the most from Memecoins).

What will happen next?

No one really knows when this cycle will end, and that will determine the market direction in the short term.

Each cycle will see a new hot spot, but it may also be an evolved version of the previous trend, or a revival (or even a complete death), because people are always looking for the next opportunity to 100x.

Going back to the point I made earlier, I think the likelihood of Memecoin rising again is lower than other trends, because it has no real holders and no believers.

Basically, the largest coins will survive, and the rest will die. If the market returns, the performance of new coins is likely to surpass everything that exists.

You need to be prepared for this situation: survive, survive, and keep surviving.

If you've already withdrawn from the market before the next trend arrives, or if you don't have the capital, you'll have a hard time adapting. And in such a market, adaptability is crucial. Anyone can make money in a bull market, but making money in a bear market is a real skill, and then adapting to the next bull market is another skill. (Each cycle requires a different mindset.)