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.
Solana’s memecoin sector is in blue, Ethereum’s in purple, while Base’s and Bitcoin’s are orange and red
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:
- The Breakdown: Decoding crypto and the markets. Daily.
- 0xResearch: Alpha in your inbox. Think like an analyst.
