Source: Blockworks Research; Compiled by: 0xjs@Golden Finance

Memecoin has long been a point of contention in the cryptocurrency space.

pump.fun tokens account for over 20% of Solana’s daily DEX volume.

Is the industry's dissatisfaction with Memecoin unnecessary? This article briefly discusses it.

Memecoin has been around since the early days of cryptocurrency, with the first appearance of DOGE in 2013. In 2021, DOGE and SHIB reached incredible heights along with other tokens like the infamous Safemoon. Over the past year, a new crop of memes have gained traction.

If we trace the historical dominance of the public chains on which new tokens are created, we can see similarities with the dominance of memecoin.

Initially, almost all tokens were created on ETH, followed by the enduring BSC era, and more recently Solana has solidified itself as a hub for token creation.

Today, Solana introduces over 100,000 new token pairs to the on-chain economy each week, largely thanks to pump.fun. The Pump platform has reduced the cost and effort of token creation to nearly zero, sparking more ideas to experiment with in the form of memecoins.

Memecoin’s growth can also be seen through the growth in Telegram DEX Bot activity. The category has more than $30 billion in transaction volume and has experienced significant diversification and growth over the past year.

Looking back at the historically most popular pairs among the category leaders, we see that memecoin has historically and currently dominates DEX bot usage. In other words, they have become the professional trading venue for memecoin traders.

Interestingly, both pump.fun and the DEX bot app charge around 1% for in-app volume. These are lucrative businesses — retail investors are willing to pay to participate in the memecoin lottery.

Additionally, the introduction of Farcaster Frames and Solana Blinks means integrating memecoin directly into existing social messaging and expanding the connection between memecoin and content creation.

However, while retail investors are happy to chase memecoin volatility, institutions remain on the sidelines. But it may be possible to develop advanced strategies to trade these tokens by their beta velocity relative to gas assets (e.g. WIF to SOL).

Looking ahead, we are beginning to see a shift away from memecoins and towards generalized attention tokens, where socially integrated tokens can serve as the basis for incentivizing online content generation.