Author: Gino Matos
Compiled by: Chopper, Foresight News
The Meme coin ANSEM has surged nearly 299% in seven days, driving a recovery in the Solana Meme coin market. According to DeFiLlama data, the weekly trading volume of Pump.fun on decentralized exchanges (DEX) reached $5.33 billion, with a 30-day trading volume of $18.22 billion.
July 4th marked the first time since April 8th that Pump.fun and PumpSwap's daily trading volume exceeded $1 billion, and the trading volume for the week of June 29th to July 5th was the first to surpass $5 billion since late March.
Driven by the ANSEM rally, on July 1st, the Solana Meme coin launch platform saw the number of newly launched tokens and graduating projects hit an 80-day high. Alongside ANSEM's explosive popularity, a large number of copycat tokens emerged simultaneously. The proliferation of copycats has historically been a typical signal of a Meme coin bull market revival. A Phemex research report on July 1st pointed out that within just two weeks, the issuance fees on the Pump.fun platform recovered to 62% of their previous peak, and trading volume rebounded to 55%.
ANSEM rose 299% in a week, Pump.fun's weekly trading volume was $5.33 billion, and Meme coins accounted for over 20% of Solana's trading volume
This recovery trend is also reflected in the broader market. Data from Blockworks shows that Meme coins account for over 20% of Solana's weekly trading volume, the first time since mid-May.
A Galaxy research report from October 2025 noted that in Q4 2024, Meme coins once accounted for 50% of Solana's weekly trading volume. The current 20% share indicates only a modest market recovery, still far from its peak.
Galaxy also pointed out that compared to various formal DeFi products, Meme coins can more quickly attract ordinary retail investors to create wallets, use decentralized exchanges, and cross-chain bridges. These tokens have an extremely low barrier to entry and inherent social virality, directly converting traffic and hype into tradable assets.
However, the contradiction within the sector is also highlighted here. While Meme coins can attract new users, their ultra-fast-paced trading rules foster an extremely unequal playing field, where retail investors often end up as exit liquidity for bots and whales. The meteoric rise of ANSEM has brought this contradiction back into the spotlight.
Statistics from Galaxy show that the current average holding time for Meme coins is only 100 seconds, down from about 300 seconds in previous cycles, indicating a significant acceleration in trading pace. Sniping bots and batch wallets hoard large amounts of tokens the moment they launch, then sell off to cash out once retail investors FOMO in.
A paper presented at the 2026 ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, titled "Preventing Manipulative Bots in Meme Coin Copy Trading," fully dissects this harvesting logic: copy trading has become the mainstream entry method for retail, but bots react far faster than humans. The paper surveyed over 6,000 Meme projects, finding that the vast majority of tokens are swept up by bots within 1 to 5 blocks of launch.
The MemeTrans platform, tracking over 41,000 Solana Meme projects and 200 million on-chain transactions, found that various coordinated manipulation accounts hold an average of 36.5% of a project's circulating supply; while holdings appear dispersed, they are actually highly concentrated. In the survey, 84.13% of projects were flagged as high-risk. Another research report analyzed 34,988 Meme tokens, revealing that among the top gainers, 82.8% showed signs of artificial volume generation like wash trading and pool manipulation, with over 17,000 wallet addresses incurring cumulative losses exceeding $9.3 million.
These data clearly reflect a pattern: the Meme coins with the most exaggerated gains often have the most severe artificial manipulation.
So, has the Meme market recovered?
A bull market scenario is characterized by Pump's daily trading volume consistently exceeding $1 billion, with Solana's Meme coins accounting for close to 30% of weekly trading volume.
ANSEM drives the continuous emergence of explosive secondary Meme coins, with user growth, launch speed, and attention reinforcing each other. This situation more closely resembles the early rise of Meme coins.
In a bear market scenario, ANSEM's copycats distract investors, Pump's weekly trading volume falls back below $3 billion, and Meme coins' share of Solana's total trading volume drops to 15%-18%. In this case, ANSEM would be a flash in the pan, and traders would turn back to SOL, mainstream cryptocurrencies, and other more liquid altcoins.
Four subsequent market scenarios
It is undeniable that the Solana Meme sector possesses strong traffic-driving capabilities, achieving levels of attention and hype that most formal blockchain products find hard to match. However, with this ANSEM-driven market recovery, the industry needs to consider: Can this wave of hype break free from the old cycle of bot sniping and whale manipulation, and stop making later-entering retail investors the exit liquidity for early funds?
