A memecoin market flippening could be underway
Solana memecoins are collectively at an all-time high
Akif CUBUK/Shutterstock modified by Blockworks
This is a segment from the Lightspeed newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe.
They say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover.
But you should totally judge a chain by its memes. And Solana memecoins are collectively at an all-time high.
There are 57 memecoins with at least a $75 million market cap on CoinGecko. Sixteen of those are native to Solana, 18 are on Ethereum, and the remaining 40% are scattered across chains like Base, Bitcoin, Avalanche and Binance Chain.
It turns out that this particular selection of Solana memecoins have never been valued higher: $9.84 billion on Wednesday and slightly below that today.
Ethereum memes are otherwise sitting at about $19 billion, although shiba inu makes up nearly 60% of the total.
What’s on CoinGecko probably doesn’t encompass the full scope of memecoinery, as it doesn’t reflect everything on Pump.fun. But those coins would probably only make a marginal difference in the end.
Still, it’s telling that Solana memecoins are still gaining ground while Ethereum’s are stagnating at 35% below where they were when bitcoin peaked in March.
And if that doesn’t satisfy your Ethereum bloodlust, consider yourself lucky you’re not a Bitcoin or Base memecoin maxi.
Base still only has two primary memecoins — DEGEN and BRETT — and together they’re stuck at about a $1 billion market cap.
Bitcoin otherwise has three Runes with market caps over $75 million. For a brief moment in May, Bitcoin’s memecoins were more valuable than Base’s, but today the two ecosystems are practically neck-and-neck.
In any case, the fixation surrounding a potential Ethereum flip by Solana has us all watching DEX volumes and fee spend, to see the signs ahead of time.
I’d watch for a flippening of memecoin markets instead.
Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters:
- Blockworks Daily: Unpacking crypto and the markets.
- Empire: Crypto news and analysis to start your day.
- Forward Guidance: The intersection of crypto, macro and policy.
- 0xResearch: Alpha directly in your inbox.
- Lightspeed: All things Solana.
- The Drop: Apps, games, memes and more.
- Supply Shock: Bitcoin, bitcoin, bitcoin.
