After the ETH mainnet gradually grew quiet, degens have returned to be active on Solana once again. Despite this, it's hard to say there is a clear main narrative for the activity on Solana. To summarize, it might be fitting to describe it as "oscillating between a return to community and attention PvP."
Attention PvP
Ever since Trump issued a token, the meme coin market has grown accustomed to the playbook of relying on celebrity endorsements, hot events, and competing on speed for a long time.
Everyone is used to it, so even with poor liquidity, people still follow this playbook to find opportunities, thus forming an inertia for this kind of strategy.
$JOTCHUA, a dog meme that became popular in Spanish and English-speaking circles in 2021. On January 24, 2021, Instagram user @_kingorange uploaded an inspirational poster featuring a crudely drawn dog picture with the text "JOTCHUA," which received over 29,000 likes within three months.
Its market cap once neared $9 million at its peak. The community has significant debates over whether this token is "organic," because its launch did not occur after the meme's creator @_kingorange claimed it, making it almost impossible to say the "claim" was the direct cause of the price surge.
Many players believe this token is another instance of "setting up a play," or attribute it to KOL Ansem sparking market speculation about his purchase being related to this token when he claimed on June 9th that he had returned to buying Solana meme coins for the first time in over a year.
The same concept, even the same ticker, but your coin just doesn't pump. $JOTCHUA on the ETH mainnet was deployed as early as December 2023, and has had consistent content and community, but it couldn't compete with getting the creator to click a few buttons and claim it.
A similar situation happened with the World Cup concept. $WORLDCUP on Solana, due to bonkguy's purchase and detailed analysis, saw its market cap surge from around $5 million to once break $12 million. Meanwhile, the World Cup concept project $PITCH on Base had fallen from a peak market cap of about $7 million to nearly $700,000.
Although $PITCH indeed has its own issues, mainly on the communication front. The project is not inactive, it keeps updating, but the dev rarely speaks up, and their X (Twitter) account got repeatedly suspended and still hasn't sorted out a new one. But admittedly, without any endorsements, similar concepts and playstyles lose out in the battle for attention.
The recent new feature from pump.fun, pump.fun GO, allows anyone to post paid bounty tasks on pump.fun.
This did attract mainstream media attention, but unfortunately, once again in a negative light reaching the masses.
$Bountywork, this token's market cap once approached $2.5 million at its peak. Its dev @ayushquantt's strategy is to continuously post new tasks on pump.fun, creating hype for this token.
He certainly succeeded—by offering a bounty of 40 SOL to have someone tattoo $bountywork on their forehead.
An Indian man actually got it tattooed, and strictly followed a typo the dev made in the description—missing an 'n', incorrectly writing the ticker as $boutywork.
Initially, his bounty application was rejected because the tattoo was missing the letter 'n', and the dev demanded he correct the tattoo. Then, someone launched a new token using the incorrect tattoo as the ticker, $boutywork.
Finally, the 40 SOL bounty reward was still given to him, and the creator revenue from the new token was also given to him, earning him a total of about $48,000.
Then, as the hype faded, $boutywork has essentially gone to zero. The dev of $Bountywork is still continuously posting new bounties trying to replicate this "success," for example, having someone eat 3 insects on camera while wearing a $Bountywork t-shirt.
There are quite a few tattoo-related tasks on pump.fun; some have received up to 200 SOL in return for tattooing their own face.
Honestly, this isn't much different from the days when big brothers on Kuaishou tipped people to eat raw eggs or gulp down white liquor...
The Return of Community
Let's continue the discussion around pump.fun's new feature. Almost all bounty tasks are related to generating attention-hype for specific tokens. The only one not treated as a joke might be this bounty task for $neet—organizing a gathering in New York for people who resist work.
The reward for this bounty is paid in $neet, equivalent to over $15,000. The $neet community has previously self-organized 2 offline "anti-work gatherings" in the US; if this bounty is completed, it will be the 3rd.
Although it's unclear what pump.fun's intention is in supporting community-type meme coins, their official Twitter always features promotions for such community tokens. Although the performance of these tokens varies—for instance, $chillhouse's price has been sluggish for a while—the ones pump.fun officially picks out are generally quite community-driven and organic.
Currently, those with relatively stable visibility and price performance, besides $neet, include $troll, $buttcoin, and $triplet. A brief introduction to the survival status and themes of these community-type tokens:
- $neet: Deployed 410 days ago, peak market cap ~$51 million, current market cap ~$27 million. The community's mission is to make more people realize that dedicating most of one's life to work means losing one's own life.
- $troll: Deployed 416 days ago, holds the copyright to the classic meme Troll, listed on Coinbase. Peak market cap ~$290 million, current market cap ~$65 million.
- $triplet: Deployed 107 days ago, an abbreviation for "Tung Tung Tung Sahur," the hottest breakout character from last year's viral "Italian Classic of Mountains and Seas." Peak market cap ~$13.6 million, current market cap ~$6.6 million.
- $buttcoin: Deployed 153 days ago, originated from a 2011 joke on the Bitcoin forum, a pun on Bitcoin as "Buttcoin" (Butt coin). Peak market cap ~$68.6 million, current market cap ~$27 million.
Mentioning these tokens and the return of community-type coins brings us back to Ansem. After he mentioned returning to buy Solana memes, someone told him to just post the CA (contract address), and if he did, they would aggressively buy 1% to add to their position.
Ansem's response sparked much discussion:
"Let me explain why I don't post CAs. If I buy some Solana meme coins, and these coins already have good holders, the market will tell you which ones are good through social media performance, trading volume, holder count, etc. You shouldn't listen to me, but to the market. Meme coins relying on a group of holders who just compete on speed, wait for endorsements to dump, won't be good. Only tokens with a large community, where people within the community are willing to endure losses and promote their beliefs day after day, will succeed. Tokens dependent on a single celebrity won't do well."
Besides the older tokens mentioned above that have survived long and maintained relatively stable prices, there are indeed new tokens emerging that align with Ansem's view, such as $KINS.
$KINS is the token for Kintara, which is a blockchain game. Interestingly, Kintara hasn't led the Solana gaming sector because its rise wasn't due to the game's polish, but rather its step-by-step actions to earn community trust.
A brief introduction to $KINS' mechanism. This is an MMORPG playable in a browser; to play, your wallet needs 1,000 $KINS. Once in, you can chop wood, mine, fish, buy houses, fight monsters and bosses, and PvP.
The game has no other pay-to-win options, only a reward wheel. If players don't want to spin only once a day, they can spend $3 worth of $KINS to continue spinning. 50% of this revenue is used for token buyback and burn, 50% for project maintenance and development.
The core gameplay loop is roughly: gather resources -> craft items -> challenge tougher monsters. If players lack resources, they need to use the in-game currency "Gold" to buy from other players. Players can sell "Gold" in the game priced in $KINS, with 5% going to the treasury and 95% to the player.
It sounds fairly ordinary, and the data isn't particularly impressive either (so far, 0.5% of $KINS has been repurchased), but the project's consistent delivery has built solid trust. Perhaps because the market is so disheartening, many players have genuinely gotten into it. The number of people fishing in the game daily is increasing. The project has expanded to 5 servers, but there's still a queue...
A player successfully sold a rare mount obtained from fishing and earned $1,800:
The project team of this game almost "doesn't promote play-to-earn," instead focusing heavily on "how to build network effects and a sense of player belonging." For example, integrating various Solana community meme coins or newly hot tokens into game elements, such as auctioning mansions in the game.
Or, promoting people organizing World Cup football matches in their houses:
When it was still obscure, with less than $40,000 market cap and 243 holders, this early phase of "unheard of and unknown" was written on the stats board in the game's main map. Everyone watched Kintara persistently and rapidly update game content, slowly gaining people's trust, gradually attracting KOLs like Gake and Ansem to become part of the game as players.
So no one calls this kind of project a "set-up play."
"What are we constantly chasing after all along? A game of mutual trust, or a game of mutual deception?"
This is a recent question Zhàn Háo has been asking himself.
Hopefully, such questioning can persist and ultimately lead to a healthier market.
