AI bots turbocharge Solana trading metrics

Solana’s onchain metrics are at levels unreached, even in the peak of this summer’s memecoin mania

article-image

Artwork by Crystal Le

share


This is a segment from the Lightspeed newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe.


For the past six months, Solana’s onchain volume has ebbed and flowed with the momentum of memecoins. In recent days, that general trend seems to have been turbocharged.

Solana’s onchain metrics are at levels unreached, even in the peak of this summer’s memecoin mania. The theme of this memecoin upswing appears to be AI bots, which have captured trader mindshare and given memecoins something they have so far seemed to lack — a semblance of meaning.

Solana’s real economic value (REV), a measure of the blockchain’s income, has set new highs for four consecutive days, ginning up a record $36 million last week. This week will likely break that record again — Solana’s REV was $11 million on Thursday alone. 

Last week, nearly 78% of Solana DEX volume pertained to memecoins, per Blockworks Research, which marks an all-time high for memecoin dominance.

Solana’s price has also hit an all-time high relative to its rival, ether: For the first time ever, SOL hit 7% of ETH’s price. This frothiness has been a couple weeks in the making, but it seemed to really take off with the bizarre saga of Goatseus Maximum — a memecoin endorsed by an absurdist AI bot called truth_terminal. 

The story was unhinged enough to go viral. The token now has a market capitalization of over $730 million, while the chat bot’s public wallet now holds more than $2.7 million in crypto, largely driven by airdrops of other memecoins.

GOAT spawned a cottage industry of would-be follow-ups. On Thursday evening, each of the top eight trending tokens on the trading data site DEX Screener were AI-related, with many claiming to also be linked to some sort of “AI agent.”

For much of this year, memecoins have drawn inspiration from unserious things like funny pictures of animals or public figures. In this new memecoin market phase, traders are making it seem like they think something more serious is going on. 

One viral X thread and blog post author said truth_terminal represents “the birth of an entirely new category of coins/money,” and the saga is “unlocking portions of my brain I didn’t know I possessed.”

“It’s basically a new species of digital organism,” Miko Matsumura from gumi Cryptos Capital told me in a text.

Still, if all this AI agent business holds any real meaning, that significance remains elusive. To summarize multiple conversations I’ve had this week, “the truth_terminal story feels really important, but I can’t quite articulate my take on it.” And as Helius CEO Mert Mumtaz pointed out, “AI agents” may just be a sleight of hand rebranding of chat bots.

Memecoins now purport to be about something real though, and just having that pretense could be what’s responsible for the meme market pushing Solana metrics to all-time highs. 

“Financial nihilism is inherently self-limiting,” the popular anonymous account Sisyphus wrote of GOAT on X.

“Memecoins are a meaningless casino” isn’t a great sales pitch. “We’ve discovered a new frontier in AI” — whether that’s true or not — could be.


Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters:

Tags

Upcoming Events

Old Billingsgate

Mon - Wed, October 13 - 15, 2025

Blockworks’ Digital Asset Summit (DAS) will feature conversations between the builders, allocators, and legislators who will shape the trajectory of the digital asset ecosystem in the US and abroad.

Industry City | Brooklyn, NY

TUES - THURS, JUNE 24 - 26, 2025

Permissionless IV serves as the definitive gathering for crypto’s technical founders, developers, and builders to come together and create the future.If you’re ready to shape the future of crypto, Permissionless IV is where it happens.

Brooklyn, NY

SUN - MON, JUN. 22 - 23, 2025

Blockworks and Cracked Labs are teaming up for the third installment of the Permissionless Hackathon, happening June 22–23, 2025 in Brooklyn, NY. This is a 36-hour IRL builder sprint where developers, designers, and creatives ship real projects solving real problems across […]

recent research

Unlocked by Template (7).png

Research

Union’s improvements upon Tendermint consensus through CometBLS, coupled with ZK proving through Galois, allow for a broadly scalable, cost efficient, and low latency IBC implementation that is feasibly scalable across every existing blockchain, virtual machine and runtime. The implementation offers modular crosschain interoperability without the need for trusted intermediaries.  

article-image

Kraken’s chief security officer Nick Percoco said the exchange turned the tables on a North Korean hacker

article-image

Or is it approximately the least cypherpunk thing we could do?

article-image

Over 20% of SOL-USD swap volume goes through SolFi

article-image

CEO Vlad Tenev calls expected clarity on listing crypto asset securities “a big opportunity”

article-image

Big Tech pulled US indexes back into the green Thursday, as investors waited for two more Mag 7 first-quarter reports after the bell

article-image

Charts and takeaways from Tuesday’s jobs report and Wednesday’s GDP print, as the economy digests the tariff war