"I have quit my job for a few months and work on memes full time." Meme player Lu Qi (pseudonym) told BlockBeats. Four months ago, the meme currency $BOME on Solana attracted many crypto novices to start playing memes with its market value exceeding 1.5 billion US dollars from 0 in three days, an increase of more than 100 times. Lu Qi was one of them. "Playing memes I put about 30,000 to 40,000 yuan in my wallet when I was a kid, and I haven’t added any more money to it in the past few months, so I can earn 70,000 to 80,000 yuan (RMB) every month.”
There are many people in a similar situation to Lu Qi. These people only trade meme coins and live on the chain almost 24 hours a day. They wait for an opportunity that only takes 3 minutes to enter the market. The time they hold meme coins is usually measured in minutes. .
The vast majority of the tokens they trade come from Pump.fun, the token issuance platform on Solana. For several months, Pump.fun has maintained an average daily revenue of over $600,000, and more than 10,000 new tokens appear on Pump.fun every day. Many people shuttle between fragmented liquidity, seeking stage-specific returns in various ways.
500K cap, only play small ones
Four months ago, if the market value of Ethereum’s native tokens was less than $1M, most people would speculate that the token consensus was loose and the team was too “grassy” to dare to take action. But on Solana, the cost and time it takes to reach a consensus that is just profitable is much smaller, so the difference between hunter and prey is only a few minutes.
In 3 minutes, the hunter becomes the prey
Jiawei (pseudonym), who has been in the circle for less than a year and has just started to intensively create memes, has already felt that he is "falling behind". "Someone in the group asked what uni is. My first reaction was uniswap. In fact, everyone It’s a unibot.”
After a general trader sees a token contract, they need to copy it to the line-viewing tool for analysis before deciding whether to buy it. For meme players, this process takes minutes. When more than ten minutes have passed since a token's "buy signal" appears, you need to be alert to the upcoming "net closing moment."
Source: GMGN.AI meme currency IQ (left), ZESTY (right) lines
The principle of fast in and fast out is very simple. Players all believe that meme coins that are expected to rise must go through the order calling process. Therefore, in order to get cheap chips as early as possible, they need to enter the market before others. If you enter the market a few minutes late, the purchase price can differ several times. And if it is a small profit, it is okay. Most of the time, entering the market three minutes later is probably a "high position takeover".
For example, the meme coin $CLOWN showed signs of rising before 01:20. It rose more than 4 times in the next ten minutes, and then fell all the way back to its initial position. The token contract sent to the group has already gone through the process of monitoring tools releasing signals, copycat hunters capturing information and entering the market, and group friends discovering and sharing it. When it is seen by traders, it still has to go through the process of selecting the contract. The process of analyzing and placing buying orders on the line-watching tool. The entry time is only a few minutes away, and doubling the price may turn into a loss.
Picture source: GMGN.AI Left: The second line of the meme currency $CLOWN, right: Community discussion about a meme currency
Find ten times more on a small plate
The strategy of fast in and fast out is based on the conservative estimation of market value by meme players, which is the rule of the game in the meme market. In some telegram communities that share meme coins, the group members range from four to five hundred to several thousand. As long as the market value of a meme coin can be raised from less than a hundred K to several hundred K, there is an early ambush. It is enough for the big investors to make a profit.
Traders need to analyze their position on the "plate". If latecomers can enter the market at 100K-200K, they can also multiply their profits several times. 500K has reached the point where many meme players think the net is closed, and a market value of 600K would be considered "a bit high." Further up, you need more deterministic signals for yourself to "hold".
Source: GMGN.AI A trader’s trading records on meme coins $ABDUL and $MUMI, with the highest market values being 247.5K and 483.5K respectively.
There is another reason for the generally low market value of meme boards, that is, the participants do not have much capital. BlockBeats communicated with several meme players and found that many players have a stake of around 3-5 $SOL, and can trade up to two tokens at a time, with each transaction amount ranging from 0.5 $SOL to 2 $SOL. . "I feel that when the market is not doing well, memes will be hotter," Lu Qi said.
An increasingly mature tool
The bottom market value of tokens that are expected to be deterministic often depends on grabbing. For credibility reasons, the market value of meme coins posted to the community by group friends is often above 100K, but the real high multiple is only tens of K. You can get it only after entering.
"You can't make money by waiting for others to output in the group." For Beibei (pseudonym), group messages are only used as an auxiliary reference for transactions, and active monitoring can ensure the initiative. BlockBeats found that players who frequent memes use two or three tools at a time, with the most commonly used being GMGN, NFT Sniper (also known as abot), and Bullx.
Viewing token trends is only the most basic function of these tools. Preparations for making memes can be divided into "finding people from coins" and "finding coins from people". For this requirement, some tools are suitable for making signboards and analyzing chip distribution, and some tools are more sensitive in prompting address changes. Others perform better in terms of transaction speed.
Being able to use it is only the first step, finding the smart money and sniper tools that suit you is the most important.
GMGN and NFT Sniper have outstanding advantages in viewing the chip distribution of relevant stakeholders. GMGN is relatively newbie-friendly. You can view indicators including dev, front-row buyers, large holders, smart money, KOL, etc. You can also create a wallet list to follow. In the aspect of "finding coins from people", GMGN and NFT Sniper also provide on-chain change reminder functions. Users can add the on-chain addresses they want to monitor to the watch list. When transactions occur at these addresses, users will You can receive prompts on the web or mobile tgbot and get information as soon as possible.
Picture source left: GMGN; right: NFT Sniper
Meme player Xu Bai (pseudonym) maintains the same smart money list with his friends. Whenever a new signal pops up, Xu Bai will check how many concerned wallets are in the car, and use GMGN to check the historical transactions of the addresses in the front row of tokens. Use this to decide whether to buy. When signals appear frequently, Jiawei will look at NFT Sniper first. There are few icons on the NFT Sniper interface, the process of obtaining information is more convenient, and there are more sophisticated automatic trading strategies.
Picture source left: GMGN; right: NFT Sniper
In addition to being equipped with the right tools at these angles, traders who want to get more alpha signals will not just rely on smart money instructions, but actively look for earlier new coins, such as meme coins that are still in the market. Internal trading refers to the stage before the market value of new coins released on Pump.fun is less than 67.8K and the liquidity is transferred to raydium. Most of the new coins cannot beat the internal market, but there will also be a few walk players with "signals".
In this kind of currency, meme players assume that they are competing with the dealer and will use the word "stuff" to refer to buying. This results in faster discovery. Beibei prefers to use Bullx. “It’s a good experience to monitor new coins and transactions are fast.”
Image source: Bullx page
The functions of GMGN, NFT Sniper and Bullx overlap, but their advantages are different. In the community, you can often see meme players discussing their experience using these tools and comparing their response speeds. Only when you have mastered the use of the dog punching tool that suits you can you get started with the dog punching meme.
dev must run away, but dev is still needed
If you want to win in trading, the most important thing is to understand who your opponents are and try to predict their operations. In the meme market, the role of the opponent has changed several times, from dev to "CTO team", from "cabal" to smart money.
CTO Chengmingpai Consensus
As early as the end of last year when the Solana ecosystem staged the meme season, the community discussed the dev rug trap of meme coins. After the token rises, dev withdraws from the pool or sells the coins obtained at a very low cost, which can take away all the liquidity on the train, leaving a "broken head" line.
At that time, the main line-reading tool was birdeye. Birdeye could only distinguish traders by three different types of trading volumes, and the dev team was hidden in the dark. With the emergence of on-chain tracking tools such as GMGN and NFT Sniper, this situation has been completely changed. Both of them can clearly show the chip status of dev and early traders.
Picture source: Left: birdeye; Middle: GMGN; Right: NFT Sniper
It only costs 0.02 $SOL to issue a coin on Pump.fun, and once the token reaches the external market, the dev can get several times the profit. But now that there is a brand-name signal, there is an extra layer of insurance. Multiple meme players told BlockBeats that not buying meme coins with "dev still on board" is one of the trading principles. "Developers are like time bombs. My habit is not to buy if I see dev is still there. I will wait until there is a signal to sell dev and then get on board depending on the situation," Lu Qi told BlockBeats.
So most meme coins can only rise after dev sell. When Jiawei first started using GMGN, he found that many meme currency devs would be sold at the beginning of the market, completely missing the gains after that. For example, DLORF and OOO in the picture below started to rise 10 minutes and 1 hour respectively after dev sold all the tokens, and the increase was dozens of times.
Image source: The red DS icon in the GMGN.AI image represents dev’s operation of selling tokens.
However, dev sell can only be regarded as an elimination signal. Most meme coins that can rise are inseparable from the "CTO" link.
CTO means Community Takeover, which refers to the situation where the original developer abandons the project and the user community takes it over. After an encryption project is CTO, for retail investors, it means that the developer’s mouse warehouse is eliminated. , community-led project development, such as the disappearance of Satoshi Nakamoto and the rise of Bitcoin, may be regarded as the most classic CTO model.
In terms of memes, the CTO is represented by the team buying rug meme coins and continuing to operate the meme coin community on X and elegram. "There was a time when you would get good deterministic returns by picking up coins that were CTOed after the devs ran away." Xu Bai recalled, "At that time, after a token was CTOed, I would go into the telegram group organized by the team to take a look. The community atmosphere can be judged by whether the team plays music, whether everyone is high in chatting, and whether they pay to update the dex."
But not all meme coins that are CTO can get on board with confidence. In terms of understanding CTO, Xu Bai’s perspective has changed from feeling the community atmosphere to analyzing the distribution of chips.
Enter the venue in 10 seconds, and the gang takes over
Now, the CTO process is included as a standard part of the meme coin life cycle, and all meme coins have learned to release this selling point. GMGN has marked the token as "CTO takeover", and most of the meme coins on the hot list have the CTO logo, even though this coin has been online for less than an hour.
For example, in the MARU picture below, dev bought the token soon after it was launched, but only held it for 27 seconds before clearing all positions, earning only a profit of 0.01 $SOL (approximately $2.08) at a cost of 5 $SOL. After dev sold, MARU started to rise, increasing 20x in 50 minutes.
Picture source: GMGN.AI The yellow icon in the picture means "CTO community takeover"
Are there really so many CTO teams that respond quickly and have miraculous results in calling orders? "Most CTOs direct and act on their own. This is common sense in memes." Xu Bai said that after BlockBeats interviewed several meme players, they found that the players are all familiar with CTO routines, and some of them are in the name of "God Disk Team." "Just saying that I am a member of the GME CTO team, I saw four Five of them," Lu Qi recalled. Some are "light speed CTOs". "After a wave of profits from dev trading, the original CTO will make another wave."
Taking MARU as an example, less than 10 seconds after dev sold the currency, several addresses quickly bought and became large currency holders. After the profit rate reached 20-40 times, they concentrated on selling, causing the MARU currency price to fall within 7 minutes. Go to 52%. From the community's perspective, this situation is most likely caused by the dev team acting as a CTO to create a rat barn.
Source: GMGN.AIMARU’s transaction records of large currency holders
Meme players already have ways to deal with it, and the profits of large currency holders are also a must-see indicator for meme players. "If you encounter a big investor who has just started to enter the market, you can try to follow them. If they make too much money, you should be cautious about getting in," Jiawei said. And Xu Bai has changed his strategy, "Now that I have a good opportunity, I will follow even if Dev is still in the car."
Milady cabals and the "cabal"
After the CTO's logic is no longer "community governance", but a process of "changing from individual banker to group banker", the hidden rug points have returned to the consideration of retail investors. But from the perspective of meme experts, this process has room for profit. Milady cabals (Milady cabals) were the first "slang" Jiawei learned when he first started making memes.
Searching for “Milady cabals” on It was the people with Milady’s avatar who forwarded it for him, and the market values of the local dogs they called were very high.”
So turning on the X bells of these people and monitoring their on-chain addresses is an important basis for meme players to bet on dogs during this period. This discovery was so popular that Pump.fun officials even joked, "Already in 13 Milady cabals, I'm serious)".
Source: Pump.fun
Yesterday, $FWOG, which was originally not optimistic due to imitating the market, achieved a 7-hour increase of 50 times and a trading volume of over 60 million US dollars. The X account avatar of its CTO team caller @deecayz is Milady. He showed it on bio There are two meme coins that have been successful for CTO.
When $FWOG reached a high, the top three largest traders of $FWOG cleared their positions and took profits. On-chain monitor ai_9684xtpa analyzed that this operation caused the token to plummet 73% in a short period of time. But this does not affect deecayz’s record. “FWOG” became his third successful work.
Image source: X bio by Twitterdeecayz
But Milady is not the only criterion for judging a "cabal". Among meme players, teams that ambush a large number of low-priced chips in advance, raise a meme coin by placing orders, and then pump-and-dump are regarded as "cabals." . Meme players need to constantly look for new rival organizations. "Now I only look at those Milady occasionally. My watch list has been cleared for a round," Beibei said.
Stay at the table
Even though he has had many successful experiences, Lu Qi still spends up to ten hours a day watching the market. "Most of the time it's boring, but often the more boring it is, the more you should wait for that seemingly inexplicable opportunity."
The person following the order may be a fake smart money
Players who can continue to make money on memes believe that trading signals are actively created from the numerous information streams and will not wait for the wealth code to hit them.
When more and more people learn to track KOL addresses and smart money addresses that have been marked by public tools, if they want to make money, players need to have stronger information analysis capabilities. "It's getting more and more difficult to follow orders now," Lu Qi said. The real code of wealth is always in a Schrödinger state.
Many obstacles stand between players and real smart money. The first is the noise on the chain. Many people will look for smart money addresses from people with a high single-coin winning rate. However, from a smart money perspective, it is not necessary to earn ten times or even a hundred times the profit rate on every investment, as long as the plate is enough If the capital is large enough, even if you only get a 20% increase in income, you can still accumulate considerable profits. "Not everyone who buys at low points is smart money, and people who pursue long-term gains don't want to be discovered by the market," Xu Bai said.
Secondly, there is poor information about the failure. If the order you follow is very small, the price will rise several times immediately after the smart money buys it. Blindly following the order will only make you an exit liquidity for the smart money. Crypto KOL 0xSun wrote an article a few days ago from the "followed perspective" and mentioned this issue.
In addition, the information gap can only be applied in a small area. Retail investors want to track the "insider market", but traders will also squeeze the space for retail investors to grab low-price chips through various methods such as washing the market, killing orders, making matrix addresses, etc. A few days ago, the KOL "Wang Xiaoer who vowed to be a diamond player" who made a large profit on meme coins called on his followers on Many days of meme coins, but "this strategy is meaningless after being copied." This can be seen as an example of the information gap dividends of smart money becoming less and less in the trend of copying.
Many players that BlockBeats has communicated with have also realized this. "Addresses that are followed by many people are of little value, and they need to keep looking for new wallets to survive." Lu Qi, Beibei and Xu Bai will spend a lot of energy maintaining their attention. on the address list.
Strategies that fail periodically
If you want to sum up a universal meme-fighting strategy, it would be "respect experience, but experience will soon fail."
For example, hyping memes around Trump news was once a code of wealth with a high probability of winning, but it has now been greatly depleted.
On the day Trump was assassinated, Lu Qi was serving as a best man to a friend. “I woke up very early that day. After reading the news about Trump’s assassination, my first reaction was to look for related meme coins. I didn’t have time to look at the market, so I scanned many of them at once. Coin." Among the coins Lu Qi bought, $EAR achieved an increase of 80 times in the first 7 hours. "I sold it all the way, but I also made good profits."
"Attention is the most important thing. When Trump releases news, coins will definitely come out." Lu Qi has since made this judgment. A few days ago, when Trump, as the first former U.S. president, gave a speech at the Bitcoin 2024 conference in Nashville, meme players went from delaying attendance to squatting throughout the speech to finishing the speech. Various memes popped up on Pump.fun in real time. Find the bet target among the keyword tokens. And among the dozens of related meme coins, none have a market cap of over 500K.
Source: Pump.fun Pump.fun homepage when Trump gave a speech
That day, the owner of the Shiba Inu Kabosu, the prototype for the meme coin $DOGE, showed off his new pet on X, which translates to NEIRO in English. In the immediate aftermath of Trump’s speech, meme coin Neiro has already attracted $50 million in trading volume. "What a mistake, I didn't expect the dog to run away from Trump," Takong meme players complained in the group.
If the KOL address movements were taken as the dominant signal, the battle between the meme coins "Neiro" and "NEIRO" would have been completely chaotic that day. NFT Sniper shows that 31 KOL addresses participated in the transaction of Neiro and 28 addresses participated in the NEIRO. Looking back, many KOLs also made “missteps”.
The Milady avatar KOL deecayz mentioned earlier gave three meme coins to the community CTO the day before he raised 50 times $FWOG. Among them, the market value of the meme coin $BEIRO, which was clearly released as ca, failed to exceed 30K.
Memes are nothing new
In the view of Zhang Ran (pseudonym), who entered the encryption industry a few years ago, "The evolution of the meme market is the same as that of ICOs a few years ago. There is nothing new."
After experiencing the crazy bubble of ICO, the encryption industry spent several years exploring new narratives such as NFT and DeFi, and formed subdivision directions such as cross-chain interoperability, expansion L2, and RWA from the perspective of reinvestment. But now, mainstream crypto investors are laughing at themselves with the phrase "value investing is a bust, and stud memes live in palaces."
Even after spending a lot of time, most meme players still have a low win rate. "Small losses and big profits" is the ideal settlement result for meme players. "On the one hand, you need to be cautious and stay at the poker table, and on the other hand, you need to seize the opportunity to be a hunter."
BlockBeats found that many players in the meme community only entered the market to learn about cryptocurrencies during the popularity of Bitcoin Inscription at the end of last year. $BOME and $SLERF three months ago confirmed their choice of the meme market. When asked whether he would understand and participate in other crypto industries besides memes, "It's not just a newbie and a leek who just came in," Lu Qi replied. "The purpose of making an investment portfolio is to hedge risks. I will try to avoid blind betting, so I will not participate if I have limited energy," Xu Bai said.
[Disclaimer] There are risks in the market, so investment needs to be cautious. This article does not constitute investment advice, and users should consider whether any opinions, views or conclusions contained in this article are appropriate for their particular circumstances. Invest accordingly and do so at your own risk.
This article is reprinted with permission from: "Rhythm Blockbeats"
Original author: Joyce, BlockBeats
