The crypto market in December is as cold as the weather.
On-chain transactions have been dormant for a long time, and new narratives are hard to come by. Just look at the drama and gossip circulating in the Chinese CT (Crypto Twitter) these past few days, and you'll know hardly anyone is playing in this market anymore.
But the English-speaking community has been discussing something new.
A meme coin called Snowball launched on pump.fun on December 18th. In four days, its market cap surged to $10 million and is still hitting new highs; yet it's barely mentioned in Chinese circles.
In the current environment, lacking new narratives and where even memes are considered unplayable, this is one of the few things that catches the eye and shows some localized wealth effect.
And the name Snowball itself tells the story it wants to convey:
A mechanism that allows the token to "roll and grow bigger by itself."
Turning Transaction Fees into Buying Pressure, Rolling the Snowball for Market Making
To understand what Snowball is doing, you first need to know how pump.fun tokens typically make money.
On pump.fun, anyone can create a token in minutes. The token creator can set a "creator fee," essentially taking a cut of every transaction into their own wallet, usually between 0.5% and 1%.
This money could theoretically be used for community building and marketing, but in practice, most Devs choose to: accumulate enough and then rug.
This is part of the typical life cycle of a shitcoin. Launch, pump, harvest fees, rug. Investors aren't betting on the token itself, but on the developer's conscience.
Snowball's approach is to not take this creator fee money.
To be precise, 100% of the creator fees do not go to anyone's wallet but are automatically transferred to an on-chain market-making bot.
This bot performs three actions at regular intervals:
First, it uses the accumulated funds to buy tokens on the market, creating buying support;
Second, it adds the bought tokens and the corresponding SOL to the liquidity pool, improving trading depth;
Third, it burns 0.1% of the tokens with each operation, creating deflation.
Additionally, the percentage of creator fees this coin charges is not fixed; it fluctuates between 0.05% and 0.95% based on market cap.
It takes a higher percentage when the market cap is low, allowing the bot to accumulate ammunition faster; it reduces the fee when the market cap is high, decreasing transaction friction.
In one sentence, the logic of this mechanism is: every time you trade, a portion of the money automatically becomes buying pressure and liquidity, instead of going into the developer's pocket.
Therefore, you can easily understand this snowball effect:
Transactions generate fees → Fees become buying pressure → Buying pressure pushes up the price → Higher price attracts more transactions → More fees... theoretically, it can roll on by itself.
On-Chain Data Situation
Now that we've covered the mechanism, let's look at the on-chain data.
Snowball launched on December 18th, four days ago. Its market cap grew from zero to $10 million, with a 24-hour trading volume exceeding $11 million.
For a shitcoin on pump.fun, this performance is considered relatively long-lasting in the current environment.
In terms of token distribution, there are currently 7,270 holder addresses. The top ten holders combined account for about 20% of the total supply, with the single largest holder holding 4.65%.
(Data source: surf.ai)
There's no address holding 20-30% of the supply; the distribution is relatively decentralized.
Regarding transaction data, there have been over 58,000 transactions since launch, with 33,000 buys and 24,000 sells. The total buy volume is $4.4 million, and the sell volume is $4.3 million, resulting in a net inflow of about $100,000. Buying and selling are basically balanced, with no one-sided selling pressure.
The liquidity pool holds about $380,000, half in tokens and half in SOL. For a market cap of this size, the depth isn't very thick, and large orders would still experience significant slippage.
Another noteworthy point is that Bybit Alpha announced listing the token less than 96 hours after launch, which to some extent confirms the short-term hype.
Perpetual Motion Meets a Cold Market
After looking around, you can see that the English community's discussion about Snowball mainly focuses on the mechanism itself. Supporters' logic is straightforward:
This is the first meme coin that locks 100% of the creator fees into the protocol, preventing developers from rugging, making it structurally safer than other shitcoins, at least.
The Dev is also playing into this narrative. The developer wallet, market-making bot wallet, and transaction logs are all public, emphasizing "verifiable on-chain."
@bschizojew labels himself as "on-chain schizophrenic, 4chan special forces, first-generation meme coin veteran," radiating a self-deprecating degen vibe that strongly appeals to the crypto-native community.
But a safe mechanism and making money are two different things.
The snowball effect relies on the premise that there is sufficient trading volume to continuously generate fees to feed the bot for buybacks. More trades mean more ammunition for the bot, stronger buying pressure, higher prices, attracting more people to trade...
This is the ideal state where any meme coin's so-called buyback flywheel spins up in a bull market.
The problem is, the flywheel needs external force to start.
What is the current crypto market environment? On-chain activity is sluggish, overall meme coin hype is down, and there's already little capital willing to chase shitcoins. In this context, if new buying pressure doesn't keep up and trading volume shrinks, the fees the bot receives will become less and fewer, buybacks will weaken, price support will diminish, and trading willingness will decline further.
The flywheel can spin forward, but it can also spin in reverse.
A more realistic problem is that the mechanism solves only one risk point—"developers taking the money and running"—but meme coins face far more risks than that.
Whales dumping, insufficient liquidity, narratives going out of style—any one of these happening would render the 100% fee buyback largely ineffective.
Everyone is tired of being rugged. A Chinese crypto brother summarized it quite well:
Play if you want, but don't get in over your head.
More Than One Snowball is Rolling
Snowball isn't the only project telling this automated market-making story.
Within the pump.fun ecosystem, a token called FIREBALL is doing something similar: automatic buybacks and burns, packaged as a protocol other tokens can plug into. But its market cap is much smaller than Snowball's.
This indicates the market is currently responsive to the direction of "mechanism-based meme coins."
The traditional玩法 of shilling, pumping, and community hype is finding it harder to attract capital. Using mechanism design to tell a "structurally safe" story might be one of the recent trends for meme coins.
That said, artificially creating a specific mechanism isn't a new玩法.
The most typical case in 2021 was OlympusDAO's (3,3), which used game theory to package a staking mechanism, telling the story "if everyone holds, everyone profits," reaching a peak market cap of billions of dollars. The ending, as everyone knows, was a death spiral, dropping over 90%.
Even earlier, there was Safemoon's玩法 of "taxing every transaction and distributing it to holders," also a narrative of mechanism innovation, which ended with the SEC suing and charging the founders with fraud.
Mechanisms can be great narrative hooks, capable of gathering capital and attention in the short term, but the mechanism itself does not create value.
When external capital stops flowing in, even the most精巧designed flywheel will stop turning.
Finally, let's recap what this little gem is actually doing:
Turning the meme coin's creator fees into an "automated market-making bot." The mechanism itself isn't complicated, and the problem it solves is very clear: preventing developers from directly taking the money and running.
The developer not being able to rug doesn't mean you will make money.
If after reading this you find the mechanism interesting and want to participate, remember one thing: it is first and foremost a meme coin, and only secondly an experiment with a new mechanism.
