MEME liquidity gambling game: Who ultimately profits from the capital狂欢?
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MEME liquidity gambling game: Who ultimately profits from the capital狂欢?
Behind the growing prosperity of meme culture lies an intricate struggle for interests involving multiple parties.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsBy Nancy, PANews
Behind the growing popularity of meme culture lies an intricate web of interests involving multiple stakeholders. In this intense and competitive game, various participants are key forces driving the rising heat of the meme market, with some even profiting handsomely, becoming direct beneficiaries of the frenzy.
Top Players / Survivors
The wealth effect of memes significantly amplifies market enthusiasm, especially as stories of multiplying returns by hundreds or even thousands of times go viral on social media, fueling investor euphoria. However, true "diamond-handed" holders who steadfastly retain their positions are extremely rare, and severe survivorship bias exists beneath the surface. For example, recent data from Lookonchain showed a trader bought five different meme coins out of FOMO within just five hours, only to exit each position at a loss—suffering total losses amounting to 274 SOL (approximately $43,500). According to Onchain Lens, another "not-so-clever" trader purchased 12.15 million GNON tokens for 10 SOL ($1,505), then sold them one minute later for only 7.32 SOL (~$1,113), incurring a $392 loss. That same holding would now be worth over $8.5 million.
In truth, most participants in this asset frenzy are merely going with the flow, and many unfortunately end up serving as exit liquidity for redistribution of profits. It's important to recognize that high returns often attributed to so-called “smart money” typically stem from a combination of ample capital, sharp market insight, diverse technical tools, and strong psychological resilience. For instance, Murad, recently hailed by the community as the “Meme Godfather,” has made substantial investments across numerous meme projects. Chain sleuth ZachXBT revealed in early October that Murad’s meme portfolio was already valued at $24 million. His current holdings—including SPX, POPCAT, MOG, and APU—have generated highly attractive returns, with some yielding gains of tens of times his initial investment.
However, behind many so-called “smart money” actors are often insiders or project teams themselves. Take the meme coin SHAR: Lookonchain monitoring revealed that an insider sold 500 million SHAR tokens—50% of the total supply—in a single transaction, receiving 19,620 SOL (around $3.38 million). This dump caused SHAR’s price to crash by approximately 96%. The rug pull also exposed several KOLs who participated in early hype-building and profit-taking.
Launch Platforms
Thanks to lowered issuance barriers and improved trading efficiency, meme launch platforms have attracted massive traffic and capital. Take Pump.fun as an example. According to Dune Analytics, since its launch in early March, over 376 addresses have issued more than 2.6 million tokens via Pump.fun. Just in the past 24 hours alone, around 12,000 addresses launched 21,000 tokens. These figures clearly reflect strong demand for memes and have enabled Pump.fun to generate enormous revenue. Data from Dune shows that as of October 24, Pump.fun had accumulated over 990,000 SOL in revenue (worth approximately $150 million). Lookonchain reported that Pump.fun has already sold 503,343 SOL at an average price of $156.40, realizing proceeds of $78.7 million.
Nonetheless, meme launch platforms exhibit clear first-mover advantages. As previously analyzed by PANews, the majority of issuance volume and user traffic in the meme market is dominated by leading platforms like Pump.fun.
Deployers (Devs) / Community Takeover (CTO)
With lower barriers and costs for launching memes, including the recent surge in AI-agent-inspired memes, many token deployers (devs) have flooded into the market to seize profit opportunities.
For example, Lookonchain data shows that the Neiro deployer turned 3 SOL into 15,508 SOL—a staggering 5,169x return. PeckShield monitoring revealed that the deployer of Void on Base, thevoid.base.eth, removed liquidity and swapped tokens for about 130 ETH (worth ~$360,000), after which the token plunged 99%. On-chain Lens reported that the PELF deployer sold 3.2 million PELF tokens for approximately 662 SOL ($103,000), with additional sales likely occurring from other wallets. SANYUAN Labs disclosed that an address starting with "4Ddr" launched 300 meme coins within the past 30 days, earning $100,000 per month. Such cases are increasingly common.
As these devs cash out and exit, CTO (Community Takeover) projects emphasizing "community autonomy" have become a focal point of market interest. Successful examples not only attract widespread attention but are even being adopted by some groups as new profit-making tools.
Blockchains
As Solana’s meme ecosystem rapidly gains popularity, the trend is spreading to other major blockchains such as Ethereum, Base, TON, Sui, and BSC, significantly boosting their key metrics. Among them, Solana and Ethereum serve as the two primary battlegrounds for meme enthusiasts, with most popular and top-tier projects originating from these chains. According to the latest data from CoinGecko, as of October 24, the total market cap of memes on Ethereum exceeded $35.5 billion, while Solana’s reached nearly $12 billion—accounting for 63.1% of the overall market. This underscores the dominant influence and appeal of Ethereum and Solana in the meme space.
While Ethereum leads slightly in overall meme market size, it relies largely on established veterans like DOGE, SHIB, and PEPE. In contrast, Solana has emerged as fertile ground for the current meme wave, producing many of the newest leading meme coins and injecting strong momentum into its own growth. For instance, DefiLlama data shows that driven by heightened speculation around meme coins, daily transaction fees on Solana surged to $550,000—the highest level since early May 2024—and the second-highest in its history.
PANews has previously analyzed the differing characteristics of meme development on Solana versus Ethereum, noting that Solana memes excel at quickly leveraging trending topics to capture traffic, demonstrating stronger price volatility and capital magnetism. Ethereum, meanwhile, benefits from a deeper pool of capital and users, supporting a broader diversity of meme types.
Tool and Service Providers
To stay ahead of the curve in identifying opportunities among countless assets, meme hunters rely heavily on effective and practical tools. These products and services generate revenue by offering valuable utilities to investors and issuers through subscription models, usage fees, and premium features.
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