While cryptocurrency enthusiasts were busy debating the merits of Bitcoin and Ethereum, Solana quietly transformed into the wild west of meme coins. By January 2025, SOL had rocketed to $294, and an astonishing 80,000 new tokens were being created daily. Why? Dirt-cheap transaction fees and blazing-fast 65,000 TPS processing speeds. A speculator’s dream. Or nightmare, depending on which side of the rug pull you landed on.
The ecosystem exploded thanks to platforms like Pump.fun, which revolutionized token creation in January 2024. Want to launch your own worthless digital asset? No problem! Exchanges like Raydium and Orca made it stupidly simple to provide liquidity. PumpSwap even eliminated the 6 SOL fee for token transfers. Because why have barriers when you’re creating a financial free-for-all?
Some hits were massive. The TRUMP token reached a $14 billion market cap with a fully diluted valuation of $70 billion. MELANIA launched at $1.6 billion. Both crashed spectacularly – TRUMP down 86% from its peak, MELANIA down 95% in just seven weeks. This pattern follows the typical meme coin formula where early adopters profit while retail investors are left holding worthless tokens. That’s not even mentioning Libra’s alleged $251 million rug pull that happened within hours. Oops.
At its peak, daily DEX volume hit a mind-boggling $35.9 billion. Solana fees reached $55.3 million in mid-January 2025. The trading frenzy was so intense it caused outages at Coinbase as users rushed to trade $SOL. Everyone was getting rich! Until they weren’t.
By March 2025, the party was ending. Daily token launches plummeted to under 50,000. DEX volume crashed to under $1 billion. Network revenue dropped 93% from January’s peak. Turns out pump-and-dumps aren’t sustainable. Shocking.
The scandals were inevitable. Pump.fun’s inappropriate livestream content. The Libra token disaster that Argentine President Milei promoted before it crashed 98%. Even Coinbase’s CEO admitted some memecoins had “gone too far.”
Ethereum’s co-founder blasted the blockchain community for tolerating “casinos.” Cathie Wood warned of “fearsome declines.” The SEC formed a special unit to investigate. Too little, too late. The $137 billion memecoin market cap has already shrunk by 68%. Paradise lost.
