Memecoins explained: how they work, who profits and why most go to zero
How memecoins are launched, traded and drained: bonding curves, pump.fun fees, bundlers and snipers, the TRUMP and LIBRA cases, the SEC's 2025 stance and how to read a holder distribution.
Key takeaways
- Memecoins are tokens whose value rests on attention rather than cash flows or utility: the SEC’s Division of Corporation Finance said on February 27, 2025 that they are generally not securities and compared them to collectibles.
- The launch pipeline is industrial. Pump.fun had processed about 11.9 million token launches between January 2024 and June 2026, roughly 42,000 in a single day at one point, and fewer than 2 percent of them ever left the bonding curve.
- The economics favour the venue and insiders. Pump.fun had earned more than $800 million in cumulative fees by June 2026, while Solidus Labs found in May 2025 that 98.6 percent of tokens on the platform showed pump-and-dump or rug-pull characteristics.
- Political and celebrity tokens showed the extraction mechanics at scale: 80 percent of TRUMP supply sat with Trump-affiliated entities at its January 17, 2025 launch, and a forensic analysis found 813,294 wallets lost a combined $2 billion.
- Legal recourse is thin. On September 29, 2026 a New York federal judge dismissed the LIBRA and M3M3 class action with prejudice, before any discovery, largely on pleading and jurisdiction grounds.
Who this is for: Institutional analysts, founders, policy staff and serious retail participants who want to understand how memecoins are created, traded and drained, and who want a repeatable method for reading a token’s holder data before forming a view.
Memecoins are the part of crypto that outsiders find easiest to mock and insiders find hardest to ignore. A token with a dog on it and no product can reach a market capitalisation in the billions within days, pay its venue millions in fees, and then lose 99 percent of its value. In 2024 and 2025 that cycle ran at industrial speed on Solana, where one launchpad minted tens of thousands of tokens a day.
It matters now for three reasons. The money is real: launchpads, exchanges and validators earned hundreds of millions of dollars from memecoin flow. The politics changed in 2025, when a sitting US president and the president of Argentina each put their names behind a token within a month. And regulators have spoken: the SEC staff view that memecoins are not securities removed one legal cloud and left another. If the asset is a collectible, who protects the buyer when the insiders leave?
This guide explains the mechanism, the participants, the money flows and the failure modes, walks through a pump.fun launch with fee arithmetic, and covers the legal record through October 2026. It does not tell you what to buy.
Memecoins by the numbers
What a memecoin is, and what it is not
A memecoin is a fungible token whose appeal is cultural rather than functional. It does not entitle the holder to revenue, governance over a working protocol, or access to a service. Its price is a measure of how many people want to hold the joke, the mascot or the political signal at a given moment. The SEC staff put it in dry terms in February 2025: value derives from speculative trading and collective sentiment, like a collectible.
That separates memecoins from utility tokens that pay for a service, such as fees on Solana, from governance tokens that confer votes in a DAO, and from stablecoins backed by reserves. A memecoin has none of these, and its promoters generally say so. That candour is also its legal shield.
Four generations of memecoin
Dogecoin was created on December 6, 2013 by Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer as a parody of the altcoin boom. It stayed a curiosity until Elon Musk’s posts from December 2020 onward pushed it to a market capitalisation approaching $85 billion on May 5, 2021. Shiba Inu, launched in August 2020 on Ethereum, showed that a memecoin did not need its own chain, only a contract and a community; it peaked near $43 billion. PEPE, launched in April 2023 with no stated purpose at all, reached about $11.4 billion. dogwifhat (WIF), launched on Solana in late 2023, reached about $4.8 billion and marked the shift of memecoin activity to a chain with sub-cent fees and sub-second blocks.
The fourth generation is not a coin but a factory. Pump.fun launched on January 19, 2024 and let anyone create a token in under a minute, with pricing handled by a bonding curve. The question stopped being which memecoin would win and became how a venue could monetise tens of thousands of attempts a day.
Launchpads and bonding curves: how the factory works
Before 2024 a creator had to mint a token, seed a liquidity pool with their own capital, set a price and market it. A bonding curve replaces the pool with a formula: the contract holds a fixed supply, and the price rises as buyers put SOL in and falls as they take it out. No initial liquidity is required, and no one can withdraw the SOL in the curve except by selling tokens back into it.
- Creation. The creator pays a small fee, uploads a name, ticker and image, and the contract mints a fixed supply, one billion tokens in pump.fun’s standard design.
- Curve trading. Buyers and sellers trade against the contract. Each trade pays a fee to the platform, 1 percent on pump.fun according to Solana Compass’s June 2026 account of the mechanics. The first buyer pays the lowest price; each subsequent buy pushes the price up along the curve.
- Graduation. When the curve has absorbed a fixed amount of SOL, about 85 SOL on pump.fun according to Blofin’s 2026 explainer, equivalent to a market capitalisation of roughly $69,000 at the SOL prices of early 2026, the token graduates. The SOL raised and the unsold tokens are moved into a liquidity pool on a decentralised exchange.
- Open market. From graduation onward the token trades on an automated market maker where anyone can add or remove liquidity, and where the venue takes a swap fee on every trade.
Where the fees go
Until March 2025 graduated tokens migrated to Raydium, Solana’s largest AMM, which earned the swap fees. Pump.fun then launched its own exchange, PumpSwap, and kept them. Cryptopolitan reported in January 2026 that pump.fun takes 1.5 SOL at graduation and about 1 percent on subsequent swaps. In 2025 it also began paying creators a share of trading fees; NullTX’s September 22, 2026 analysis put cumulative creator payouts at $86.7 million, peaking at $25.85 million in the first quarter of 2026. A creator who keeps a token traded now earns more than one who dumps on day one, although most still dump.
The PUMP token
On July 12, 2025 pump.fun sold its own token. The public sale raised $600 million in about 12 minutes and a private round raised a further $720 million, about $1.3 billion in total at a $4 billion valuation. The tokenomics are set out in CCS’s July 2026 reporting on the first large unlock: 33 percent of the one trillion supply went to the ICO, 57 percent to team, existing investors and community or ecosystem allocations combined, and 11 percent to livestreaming, liquidity and foundation buckets, with cliff vesting extending through 2029. From July 2025 pump.fun used protocol revenue to buy PUMP on the open market and burn it. In April 2026 it executed a one-off burn of about $370 million, around 36 percent of circulating supply, and committed half of all revenue to buybacks for the following year. Pump.fun’s own token page showed 169.9 billion PUMP burned, worth $474.6 million, and annualised revenue of $552.6 million as of October 4, 2026, with the token at a market capitalisation of $2.56 billion.
Even so, CCS reported in early July 2026 that PUMP traded near $0.0015, 62 percent below its $0.004 ICO price, ahead of a $127 million investor unlock on July 12, 2026 equal to 29 percent of circulating supply. Buybacks can be deflationary at the margin and still lose to unlocks.
Competition between launchpads
Pump.fun’s dominance was challenged in mid 2025 by LetsBonk, a launchpad built on Raydium’s LaunchLab infrastructure and tied to the BONK community, which overtook pump.fun on daily launches for a period in July 2025 by routing part of its fees to BONK buybacks. Launchpads compete on who shares the fee pie, not on features, because the product is identical everywhere: a curve, a threshold, a pool.
| Venue | Role | Fee model | Who captures the fee |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pump.fun bonding curve | Launch and price discovery | 1% on every curve trade, plus 1.5 SOL at graduation (Solana Compass, Cryptopolitan, 2026) | Platform, with a share to creators since 2025 |
| PumpSwap | Post-graduation AMM (since March 2025) | Swap fee on every trade, part to LPs, part to protocol, part to creators | Pump.fun, liquidity providers, creators |
| Raydium | Original graduation venue; LaunchLab for rivals | Standard AMM swap fee split between LPs and RAY buybacks | Raydium LPs and RAY holders |
| LetsBonk | Rival launchpad (mid 2025) | Curve fees with a share routed to BONK buybacks | Platform and BONK community |
| Solana validators and Jito | Block production and priority ordering | Priority fees and MEV tips on every transaction | Validators, stakers, Jito tip recipients |
Who profits: the participant map
The memecoin economy is best understood as a set of roles, each extracting from the next.
Creators pay almost nothing to launch and earn by holding supply bought at the bottom of the curve and selling into later buyers, and, since 2025, by receiving a share of trading fees. CoinGecko data CCS reported in May 2026 shows how thin the distribution is: of 3.14 million active pump.fun wallets in April 2026, 169,000 (5.4 percent) booked profits above $1,000; most profitable wallets made between $1 and $500.
Bundlers are creators or their partners who buy a large share of the supply in the same block as the launch, using many wallets so that the position looks like organic demand. Solana’s block times make this practical, and specialised tooling exists for it. A bundled launch can show 30 to 70 percent of supply controlled by one actor across dozens of addresses.
Snipers run bots that detect new token creation and buy within the first second, then sell into the first wave of attention. They are not insiders, but they capture the same early-curve pricing, which is why retail buyers almost never get the bottom of a curve.
Venues and infrastructure are the most reliable winners. Pump.fun’s cumulative fee revenue passed $800 million by June 2026 and NullTX measured $97.6 billion of cumulative DEX volume on its platform by September 2026. Every trade also paid Solana priority fees and often MEV tips, so memecoin volume fed validator income in 2024 and 2025; Dextools reported in 2026 that Solana fees had dropped 84 percent alongside the collapse in graduation rates.
Late buyers fund all of the above. In TRUMP’s case, a forensic analysis cited by Wikipedia found 813,294 wallets lost a combined $2 billion while Trump-linked entities earned at least $350 million in trading fees by March 2025, according to the Financial Times.
The data on survival and extraction
The clearest finding across every study is that the base rate of success is close to zero.
Graduation. Fewer than 2 percent of pump.fun tokens ever reached a DEX pool according to The Block’s June 2026 data, with other measurements near 1.4 percent. Daily rates swing: Cryptopolitan counted 269 graduations in one day in January 2026, just over 1 percent of launches and the highest share since summer 2025, when the benchmark was 0.92 percent; Dextools reported a low of 0.26 percent in a quieter 2026 window. Graduation is not success: only 18 pump.fun tokens ever exceeded a $10 million market capitalisation and 96 reached $1 million, out of 11.9 million launches.
Fraud markers. Solidus Labs analysed more than 7 million pump.fun tokens and 361,000 Raydium liquidity pools in a report published in May 2025. It found 98.6 percent of pump.fun tokens had scam or manipulated-trading characteristics, that only 97,000 tokens (1.4 percent) ever held $1,000 or more of liquidity, and that 93 percent of Raydium pools showed soft rug pull patterns in which insiders drained liquidity gradually rather than in one transaction. The median rug pull was small, $2,832, and about a quarter involved less than $732. Fraud in this market is a volume business, not a heist business.
Trader outcomes. CoinGecko’s April 2026 cohort found 73.3 percent of participants exited positions profitably that month, against a low of 30.1 percent in June 2025. Both figures need care: a $5 gain counts as profitable, and monthly active wallets had fallen 65 percent from 5.2 million in May 2025 to 1.8 million in December 2025 before recovering. Survivors in a shrinking market are disproportionately bots and professionals.
Celebrity and political tokens
HAWK, December 2024
The Hawk Tuah token (HAWK), launched in December 2024 around internet personality Haliey Welch, reached a $490 million market capitalisation and fell to about $25 million within hours amid accusations of a pump-and-dump and insider trading. It was the template for what followed.
TRUMP and MELANIA, January 2025
The Official Trump token launched on January 17, 2025, three days before the inauguration. Of a one billion supply, 200 million was released publicly and 80 percent of the remainder, 800 million tokens, was held by Trump-affiliated entities. It was the 19th most valuable crypto asset by January 19. MELANIA launched that day and was down 99 percent by November 2025; TRUMP was down 86 percent by the same month. The Financial Times estimated Trump-linked entities had earned at least $350 million in trading fees by March 2025. In May 2025 the top 220 holders were offered dinner with the president at Trump National Golf Club in Virginia; NBC News calculated the winners had collectively spent $394 million on the token. Another event for top buyers followed at Mar-a-Lago in April 2026, when TRUMP still ranked sixth among memecoins at $552 million. CCS covered the dinner-driven rally at the time.
LIBRA, February 2025
LIBRA launched on February 14, 2025. Argentine President Javier Milei posted in support 23 minutes after it was minted, describing it as a project to fund Argentine small businesses, and deleted the post the same day as the price collapsed. Court filings cited by Solana Compass allege that linked wallets extracted about 44.6 million USDC and 249,665 SOL from the liquidity pools between February 14 and 16. The promoter, Hayden Davis of Kelsier Ventures, had met Milei at the Casa Rosada on January 30, 2025. Cryptopolitan reported in July 2025 that Davis argued in US court filings that LIBRA was a memecoin with no plans or infrastructure and that memecoins are not investments, a defence that leans directly on the SEC staff position. A class action filed in March 2025 in the Southern District of New York won a temporary freeze on $57.65 million in USDC, which Judge Jennifer Rochon dissolved in August 2025 while expressing scepticism about the plaintiffs’ chances.
Market structure: Raydium, PumpSwap, MEV
Once a token graduates it lives in a constant-product liquidity pool. Three structural features determine what happens next.
Pool depth. A pump.fun graduation seeds the pool with roughly 85 SOL and the unsold tokens, around $17,000 to $20,000 of liquidity on each side at a $200 to $230 SOL price. Thin pools are the mechanical reason memecoin charts are so violent, and why liquidity, not market capitalisation, is the number that matters.
Fee competition. PumpSwap’s March 2025 launch was a direct attack on Raydium’s revenue, which had come to depend on graduated memecoins; Raydium answered with LaunchLab, the infrastructure behind LetsBonk. Fee capture, not trading quality, drives venue strategy.
MEV and ordering. Most Solana validators run the Jito client, which lets traders attach tips for priority. Snipers and bundlers pay to land in the launch block; sandwich bots pay to trade around large retail buys. Those tips are income for validators and stakers, which is why memecoin mania lifted Solana staking yields in 2024 and 2025.
Regulation: the SEC statement and what it changed
On February 27, 2025 the SEC’s Division of Corporation Finance issued a staff statement on meme coins. It describes them as crypto assets inspired by internet culture, bought for entertainment and social interaction rather than utility, with value that comes from speculative trading and collective sentiment. It concludes that a meme coin fitting that description is not a security under the Howey test, because buyers’ funds are not pooled to build an enterprise and profits do not come from the entrepreneurial or managerial efforts of others; promoters typically do nothing more than post on social media and seek exchange listings.
Three caveats matter. It is a staff statement, not a Commission rule or court decision. It excludes tokens that use the label to evade securities law, with the analysis turning on economic realities. And it says fraud may still be pursued by other federal or state agencies, a division of labour covered in CCS’s guide to SEC versus CFTC jurisdiction.
The effect was visible within months. On September 29, 2026 Judge Rochon dismissed the LIBRA and M3M3 class action, Hurlock v. Kelsier Ventures, with prejudice. The RICO claims failed because an alleged scheme running from October 2024 to March 2025 was, in the court’s words, not a substantial period of time; fraud claims against former Meteora chief executive Benjamin Chow failed because profit motive alone was not enough; claims against Davis and Kelsier failed for lack of personal jurisdiction in New York; and a proposed second amended complaint adding MELANIA and other tokens was rejected as futile. The case ended before discovery, so none of the extraction allegations were tested. CCS’s report on the dismissal noted the broader lesson: once insiders exit cleanly, US civil recourse for memecoin buyers is close to zero.
Venues face more pressure than tokens. Pump.fun blocked UK users in December 2024 after a Financial Conduct Authority warning, Quebec’s AMF warned in 2026 that it lacked registration to solicit Quebec investors, and a January 2025 New York class action alleges it operated as an unregistered securities exchange.
How we got here: a timeline
Worked example: a pump.fun launch from curve to graduation
Assume a token launched on pump.fun with the platform’s standard parameters: one billion tokens minted, about 793 million sold along the curve, the remainder reserved for the liquidity pool, and graduation when roughly 85 SOL of real deposits have accumulated. Assume SOL trades at $200 and a 1 percent fee on every curve trade.
- Launch block. The creator and a bundle of 24 associated wallets buy 2 SOL each in the first block, 50 SOL in total. Because they buy at the bottom of the curve they receive about 55 percent of the tradeable supply. A sniper bot lands in the same block with 3 SOL.
- Attention phase. Over the next 40 minutes, 180 external wallets buy a combined 110 SOL and some early buyers sell 78 SOL of tokens back into the curve. Net deposits reach 85 SOL and the token graduates. Total curve volume is 50 + 3 + 110 + 78 = 241 SOL.
- Platform revenue. At 1 percent, curve fees are 2.41 SOL, about $482. Add the 1.5 SOL graduation fee, about $300. Pump.fun has earned roughly $780 from this launch before it reaches a DEX. Multiply by the 269 graduations Cryptopolitan counted on one January 2026 day and graduations alone produced about $210,000, before fees on the 98 percent of launches that never graduate and before PumpSwap swap fees.
- Pool depth. The pool opens with about 85 SOL ($17,000) against roughly 207 million tokens, implying a market capitalisation near $82,000 at $200 SOL. A single 5 SOL sell at this depth moves the price by roughly 11 percent.
- Holder read. A snapshot shows the top 25 holders controlling 55 percent of supply, all funded from two parent wallets within 30 seconds of launch. That is a bundle, whatever the Telegram group says.
- Exit. At a $600,000 market capitalisation, about 7 times graduation, the bundled wallets sell. Their 50 SOL of buys realise roughly 300 SOL before slippage; the pool cannot absorb it and the price falls more than 70 percent in two minutes.
| Line item | SOL | USD at $200 | Who receives it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Curve trading fees (1% of 241 SOL) | 2.41 | $482 | Pump.fun (part shared with creator) |
| Graduation fee | 1.50 | $300 | Pump.fun |
| Bundle gross proceeds on exit | ~300 | ~$60,000 | Creator and associated wallets |
| Bundle cost basis | 50 | $10,000 | Paid into curve at launch |
| Late buyer losses | ~250 | ~$50,000 | Borne by the 180 external wallets |
The figures are illustrative, but the structure is general: the venue earns a certain few hundred dollars per launch, the bundle earns a multiple of its stake if attention arrives, and external buyers as a group lose what the bundle gains, less fees.
How to evaluate a memecoin: a checklist
- How concentrated is the holder distribution? Look at the top 10 and top 50 holders excluding the liquidity pool and exchanges. More than 30 percent in the top 10 means a small group controls the price; check whether those wallets were funded from a common source.
- Was the launch bundled or sniped? Block explorers and bundle checkers show how many wallets bought in the creation block and whether they share funding. A clean launch has a handful of early buyers from unrelated wallets; a bundled one has dozens from one parent.
- How deep is the liquidity relative to market capitalisation? A $10 million market capitalisation on $150,000 of liquidity cannot be exited by anyone of size. Liquidity, not market capitalisation, bounds what you can sell.
- Who controls the liquidity? On a curve launch the LP is created by the protocol; on a manual pool, check whether LP tokens are burned or locked, for how long, and by whom.
- Is there mint or freeze authority? If the creator can mint more tokens or freeze accounts, every other metric is irrelevant. Both should be revoked.
- What does the creator wallet hold and do? Watch whether the deployer has sold, how much it still holds, and whether it is receiving creator fee payouts, which show up on chain.
- Is a real person or entity attached, and what have they said? Celebrity and political tokens have the worst record in this market. A promoter who disclaims any plans is telling you what the token is.
Risks and open questions
The first risk is the one the numbers describe: nearly every token goes to zero, and the mechanisms that drain them are cheap, automated and legal in most of the world. The SEC statement removed the securities question but left buyers relying on anti-fraud law, which the LIBRA dismissal shows is hard to invoke when promoters say plainly that the asset is a joke and the courts take them at their word. Whether other agencies fill that gap, or whether states do, is unresolved as of October 2026.
The second is concentration at the venue layer. Pump.fun’s revenue, buybacks and token price are all exposed to one activity on one chain. A launchpad’s token is a bet on sustained attention, the same bet its users make.
The third is political. Officials launching or endorsing tokens raise conflict-of-interest questions that disclosure regimes were not designed for. Open questions include whether fee-sharing with creators changes the securities analysis, and whether the memecoin pipeline is the mainstream on-ramp its defenders claim or a wealth transfer to bots.
What to watch next
- Any appeal in Hurlock v. Kelsier Ventures (late 2026). The September 29, 2026 dismissal was with prejudice; an appeal to the Second Circuit would test whether memecoin promoters can be reached under RICO or state fraud law.
- Pump.fun unregistered-exchange class action in SDNY (2026 to 2027). Filed January 2025, it asks whether the launchpad itself, not the tokens, is the regulated activity. A ruling either way reshapes launchpad economics.
- Next PUMP cliff unlocks (through 2029). With 59.7 percent of supply still vesting as of July 2026, each unlock tests whether the 50 percent revenue buyback can absorb insider supply.
- End of the one-year buyback commitment (April 2027). Pump.fun pledged half of revenue to burns from April 28, 2026; whether it renews or redirects the cash is a signal about how it sees the market.
- Solana fee revenue and graduation rates (quarterly). Graduation share and validator fee income are the best live gauges of whether memecoin attention is returning or continuing to fade.
Glossary
- Bonding curve
- A smart contract that sets a token’s price by formula based on how much has been bought, rising with each purchase and falling with each sale, so no external liquidity pool is needed at launch.
- Graduation
- The moment a bonding-curve token reaches its deposit threshold (about 85 SOL on pump.fun) and its liquidity moves to an open decentralised exchange pool.
- Bundle
- A coordinated set of wallets, usually funded from one source, that buy a large share of a token in or near the launch block so the position appears to be organic demand.
- Sniper
- An automated bot that detects new token creation and buys within the first second, ahead of human traders.
- Rug pull
- An exit in which insiders remove liquidity or sell concentrated supply, collapsing the price. A hard rug removes liquidity at once; a soft rug sells gradually.
- Liquidity lock
- A commitment, enforced by a contract or by burning LP tokens, that prevents the pool’s liquidity from being withdrawn for a set period.
- Mint authority
- The permission to create additional tokens. If not revoked, the creator can dilute every holder at will.
- Freeze authority
- The permission to freeze token accounts, preventing holders from selling. Should be revoked on any legitimate token.
- MEV
- Maximal extractable value: profit earned by reordering, inserting or front-running transactions within a block, typically by paying validators a tip.
- Jito
- A widely used Solana validator client that lets traders attach tips for priority inclusion, distributing part of the proceeds to validators and stakers.
- Howey test
- The US Supreme Court standard for an investment contract: an investment of money in a common enterprise with an expectation of profit from the efforts of others.
Why it matters
Memecoins are the purest expression of the attention economy that crypto has produced. They have no cash flows to analyse, so what remains is the mechanism: who gets in first, who controls the supply, who earns the fees and who is left holding the position. Those mechanics describe how any thinly traded asset with a concentrated float behaves, and the tools built to read memecoin holder data are now standard for any token launch.
For serious observers the sector also answers a question about where crypto’s revenue comes from. In 2024 and 2025 a large share of Solana’s fee income, a billion-dollar launchpad business and a political fundraising innovation were all built on the same pipeline. The SEC’s decision to treat the output as collectibles rather than securities settled one debate and opened another about consumer protection that courts, as the LIBRA dismissal shows, are not yet filling. Anyone building, investing or regulating in this market should start from the base rates: fewer than two in a hundred launches reach a market, and most of those do not survive it.
Sources
- SEC Division of Corporation Finance: Staff Statement on Meme Coins, February 27, 2025
- Pump.fun: PUMP Token page (supply, burns, revenue), October 4, 2026
- Solana Compass: Pump.fun 42,000 Token Launches in 24 Hours, the 2% Graduation Rate, June 10, 2026
- Solana Compass: Meteora LIBRA Lawsuit Dismissed, September 30, 2026
- The Crypto Times: US Judge Dismisses LIBRA, M3M3 Case Against Davis, Kelsier, October 1, 2026
- Crypto Adventure: Judge Dismisses LIBRA and M3M3 Memecoin Lawsuit With Prejudice, October 1, 2026
- Cryptopolitan: Hayden Davis admits LIBRA is a memecoin, not an investment, July 26, 2025
- BeInCrypto: 98% of Tokens on Pump.fun Flagged as Scams, Solidus Labs Report, May 9, 2025
- Cryptopolitan: Pump.fun token graduations rise to a six-month high, January 29, 2026
- NullTX: Pump.fun Just Crossed $460 Million in Cumulative Token Buybacks, September 22, 2026
- InteractiveCrypto: PUMP’s Buyback Boom Meets a Dilution Reality Check, September 30, 2026
- KuCoin News: Pump.fun Surpasses $300M PUMP Buybacks, February 2026
- Blofin Academy: How Many Pump.fun Coins Actually Graduate, 2026
- Phemex Academy: 2026 Meme Coin Trends, Volume Up 87%, Market Caps Down 4%, April 30, 2026
- Wikipedia: Official Trump (cryptocurrency), citing Financial Times, NBC News and forensic analyses, accessed October 2026
- Wikipedia: Pump.fun, accessed October 2026
- Wikipedia: Meme coin (DOGE, SHIB, PEPE, WIF, HAWK peak figures), accessed October 2026
- Wikipedia: Dogecoin, accessed October 2026
- Crypto Coin Show: Pump Fun is unlocking $127M insider tokens, July 8, 2026
- Crypto Coin Show: Pump.fun Traders See Turnaround in 2026, CoinGecko, May 10, 2026
Disclosure: This guide is for education only and is not investment, legal or tax advice.
Frequently asked questions
Are memecoins securities in the United States?
Generally not, according to a February 27, 2025 staff statement from the SEC's Division of Corporation Finance. Staff said tokens bought for entertainment and social reasons, whose value comes from collective sentiment like a collectible, do not meet the Howey test. The statement is not a rule, excludes tokens using the label to evade the law, and leaves fraud to other federal and state agencies.
What is a bonding curve and why do launchpads use one?
A bonding curve is a contract that prices a token by formula: each purchase pushes the price up and each sale pushes it down. It lets a creator launch without seeding a liquidity pool, and it prevents anyone from withdrawing the deposited SOL except by selling tokens. On pump.fun the token graduates to an open exchange pool once about 85 SOL has been deposited.
What share of pump.fun tokens actually succeed?
Very few. Data from The Block reported by Solana Compass in June 2026 showed fewer than 2 percent of about 11.9 million launches ever graduated to a DEX, with historical measurements near 1.4 percent. Only 18 tokens ever passed a $10 million market capitalisation. Graduation itself does not mean survival; most graduated tokens still fall sharply within days.
How did the TRUMP token work and who made money?
Official Trump launched on January 17, 2025 with 200 million of one billion tokens sold publicly and 80 percent of the remainder held by Trump-affiliated entities. The Financial Times estimated those entities earned at least $350 million in trading fees by March 2025. A forensic analysis cited by Wikipedia found 813,294 wallets lost a combined $2 billion, and the token was down 86 percent by November 2025.
What happened in the LIBRA case?
LIBRA launched on February 14, 2025 and Argentine President Javier Milei promoted it 23 minutes later, then deleted his post as it collapsed. Court filings allege linked wallets extracted about 44.6 million USDC and 249,665 SOL. A US class action won a temporary freeze of $57.65 million, which was dissolved in August 2025, and on September 29, 2026 Judge Jennifer Rochon dismissed the case with prejudice.
What is a bundled launch and how can I spot one?
A bundle is a group of wallets, usually funded from one source, that buys a large share of supply in the launch block so the token looks in demand. Check how many wallets bought in the creation block, whether they share a funding source, and what share of supply the top 25 holders control excluding the pool. Dozens of wallets from one parent controlling more than 30 percent is a bundle.
Why do memecoins matter to Solana and other blockchains?
Every memecoin trade pays network fees and often MEV tips, and in 2024 and 2025 that flow was a large part of Solana's validator and staker income. Pump.fun alone earned more than $800 million in cumulative fees by June 2026. When memecoin activity fell in 2026, analysts reported Solana fee revenue falling sharply with it, which is why chains and venues compete to host launches.
Does the pump.fun PUMP token give holders a share of revenue?
Not directly. Pump.fun uses protocol revenue to buy PUMP on the open market and burn it, which reduces supply rather than paying holders. Its token page showed 169.9 billion PUMP burned, worth $474.6 million, as of October 4, 2026, with half of revenue committed to buybacks from April 28, 2026. Large cliff unlocks for insiders continue through 2029 and can offset the effect.
This explainer is reviewed and updated as the rules and the market change. Last reviewed October 4, 2026. It is educational content and not financial, legal or tax advice.