GuShiio.com Meme coins encounter “Waterloo”, where should players go in the second half?
Author: Arain, ChainCatcher
The summer that belongs to Meme is coming to an end.
From the collapse of the Trump family’s $TRUMP to the exposure of the $Libra scam on Argentina’s presidential platform, Solana, which regards Meme as the core driving force of online transactions, has cut its online transaction volume by half, and the number of new coins issued every day has dropped by 70%. The number of Meme coins has dropped by more than 70% year-to-date… There are indications that Meme, a bubble with a total market value of nearly US$60 billion, has also begun to crack.
Investors such as Bitwise chief investment officer Matt Hougan, Dragonfly managing partner Haseeb Qureshi, Castle Island Ventures partner Nic Carter and other investors have recently expressed their views and praised Meme’s market outlook.
“I still couldn’t lie flat and had to do something,” Philo said in an interview with Chain Catcher. Philo calls himself a young player. Not long ago, he publicly stated that he had successfully landed and cleared all Meme assets. However, he could not lie down during the time when he should have been flat. Philo told ChainCathcer reporter that the next step was to start a business and build a platform to short Memecoin.
This decision means that Philo breaks away from his identity as a “P Junior” and realizes his identity transformation. Philo’s transformation is a microcosm of the tens of thousands of P players in the context of the rapid development of Memecoin.
Meme coin encounter“Waterloo “P young player reaches a crossroads
According to GoogleTrends, global search popularity for Memecoin fell precipitously after peaking in January, shrinking nearly 60% by the end of February. Coingecko statistics show that the overall decline of the Meme sector in the past seven days has ranked among the worst performing Top 10 assets in the entire crypto market. Well-known Memes such as TRUMP and MELANIA have all fallen by more than 70% year-to-date. Even blue-chip Meme coins DOGE and SHIB have also recorded negative returns.📄
Meme’s secondary market performed poorly, and the chain market also fell into a downturn. DuneAnalytics showed that the daily trading volume of Pump.fun, the Meme coin issuance platform, dropped sharply from US$390 million on January 24 to US$134 million in February, a drop of 64.83%; the number of newly issued tokens fell from 61,800 in a single day to less than 30,000, a drop of more than 50%.
Faced with the ebb of Meme, Bitwise Chief Investment Officer Matt Hougan publicly stated: … In the past year, Memecoin has been the hottest sector in the cryptocurrency field outside Bitcoin. Removing Memecoin activity from the crypto ecosystem will have an impact, and that’s what you’re seeing today. 34;
Philo was once a P player in the past wave of Memecoin wealth-making trends, and chose to retreat bravely at this time point. But few people can imagine that the young man who seized Meme’s opportunity was just in his fourth year of college this year. Due to his obsession with studying cryptocurrencies, he “voluntarily” gave up his studies-he had just received a withdrawal notice.
“I wasn’t at school most of the time, so I received a withdrawal notice. I went to college, and my future was nothing more than to find a job. My actual experience told me that it is easier to achieve the goal of making money in the Crypto circle-you may earn a lot of people in a certain year for decades or even a lifetime.” Philo told ChainCatcher reporter.
Philo’s experience is full of drama. As a civil engineering student, he taught himself programming because of his hobby. In fact, in the past few cycles, Philo bluntly said that he had seized the opportunities of DeFi and NFT and most satisfied with using the Github account to make money. This made him realize that “this is a cost-free but profitable thing”, so he went further and further down the road to programming and encrypting digital currencies, and he said that he had won several hackathons awards.
However, this time, the gold mine he dug in the Memecoin wave made him feel that he could take a break.
Why did you choose to leave your identity as a junior player at this time? Philo said that his instinct told him to do so,”I have investment experience and entrepreneurial experience. My experience tells me that whether it is investment or entrepreneurship, it is not just technology and vision, but luck also accounts for a large part.”
Separating from his identity as a junior P made Philo’s life calm for a while.”His sense of comfort, happiness, and security have all improved.” But after less than half a month of rest, Philo couldn’t sit still. He invested his attention in entrepreneurship and said that he was developing two projects, one is a Bitcoin stablecoin, and the other is a platform for shorting Memecoin.”I think shorting Memecoin is an opportunity. There are many platforms on the market that help Memecoin long positions make money, but there is still a lack of opportunities for short sellers to make money.” For me, whether entrepreneurship is something I want to do and its positive effect on the industry are two dimensions higher than profit. Even if you lose money in starting a business, it can be regarded as feeding back to the market.”
Some P players chose to leave at this time, but some P players chose to stick to their positions and upgrade to Marshal P. Memecoin field KOL@ YuYue said in an interview with ChainCatcher that his life has not changed much,”but he will focus more on life, see more new projects, and make friends. In the subsequent market, I will still actively pay attention to the Meme track and various emerging on-chain Alpha, because this form of asset issuance itself has transcended the cultural concept of Meme, so I continue to be optimistic about future on-chain assets and on-chain Meme will continue to have more opportunities, and we can just act at the right time.”
Davis Double Play Crisis: The Burst of the Bubble and Solana Selling
P’s young players came to a crossroads and made different choices, which was related to their judgment on the future outlook.
Although data shows Memecoin is starting to cool down, Yuyue does not believe the Meme track story is over.
“I think this change is a natural phenomenon, but it means a ‘low tide’ or the end of the track. In fact, the entire Meme craze has basically lasted for more than a year. It has been more than a year since last year’s Meme such as WIF and BOME. This cycle and vitality have basically far surpassed that of all other branch tracks, so the entire Meme track is in an emotional trough, which I think is a normal phenomenon.” She said in an interview.
In the past, the ring-out effect of Meme coins mainly relied on celebrity coins. Because celebrity coins often have a certain fan base and a stronger topicality, it makes it easier for famous people to become popular. But success is also Xiao He, failure is also Xiao He. Meme was pushed to a climax due to the popularity of celebrity coins, and was also criticized for celebrity coins. Events such as the Trump family’s TRUMP collapse and the Libra scam have accelerated the collapse of market confidence in Memecoin.
Treeverse founder Loopify said publicly: “Meme coin is like the NFT in the last bull market. After the tide recedes, only a bubble remains.” Take the TRUMP token as an example. Its market value once soared to US$70 billion, but after the truth about the lack of practical use cases was exposed, the price quickly returned to zero.
In this wave of celebrity Memecoin, Meme seems to have begun to lose its original intention. At first, one of the main reasons why retail investors were keen to fight Meme was to fight VC Coin, but today, retail investors have still become the injured party.
Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner of Dragonfly, said in a recent podcast: “People seem to realize the nature of Meme promoters and how these large-scale Meme coin releases are bad for retail investors… People have raised doubts about the way Meme coin works, and it has become less certain whether retail investors can continue to participate in this so-called ‘casino’.”
A person in charge of the Memecoin investment research community told ChainCatcher: “The new retail investors are basically cut off.”
In addition to Meme’s own bubble beginning to dissipate, the market has gradually shifted towards some more conservative asset attributes, which has put Meme in a dilemma similar to “Davis Double Play”. Since January 2025, the net inflow of Bitcoin ETF funds has reached US$43 billion, while the outflow of Solana, the main position of Meme coin, has exceeded US$12 billion during the same period. In addition, Solana is facing pressure to unlock 11.2 million SOL on the upcoming March 1. These tokens are sold to institutions from FTX bankruptcy liquidation assets at a low price, at a cost of only 30%-40% of the market price. The market is worried that after unlocking, it will trigger a wave of selling, and the decline in Solana’s price will further drive the price of Meme that use it as the main base to fall.
However, Yu Yue pointed out to ChainCatcher,”In fact, other tracks in the entire environment, including the ecology of various public chains, defi, etc., are not so optimistic. The core reason for the sluggish market is still liquidity, which is a problem currently facing all tracks and ecosystems in the currency circle.”
Meme players ‘second half: either roll or spin
Where should Meme players go in the second half?
On February 19, during Consensus HK, at the “Trends and Rhythms of the New Cycle of Web3” event organized by RootDtata and ChainCatcher, Cooking.city partner Kyle, Paper Venture investor 0xbing, crypto KOL YuYue, Asian on chain founder Vand Ni, and OKX Web3 product manager Leo Li held a round-table dialogue around the theme of “Meme and the Advanced Path of P Players”. In this round-table dialogue, we looked forward to Meme’s future outlook.
But perhaps like the once glorious narratives in the market, DeFi 2.0 did not appear after DeFi Summer, and Inscription Market did not welcome Inscription 2.0 after winter. New narratives captured by the market may be opened elsewhere.
And there are not only Meme and celebrity coins on the chain. According to Dune data, year-to-date, three narratives such as Derivatives, FriendTech and RWA have begun to outperform the market.
Behind the three narratives points to the rhythm of institutional funds entering.
Among them, RWA, as a trillion-dollar track under the wave of compliance, has attracted large institutions in the past year. DefiLlama data shows that the TVL (total lock-in value) of the RWA sector exceeded US$80 billion in Q1 of 2025, a year-on-year increase of 300%. Traditional institutions such as BlackRock and Fidelity have entered the market, and the stablecoin bill promoted by the U.S. Congress will further promote the compliance process.
The DeFi market began to show signs of recovery early this year. According to Messari’s report, although the transaction volume and total lock-in value (TVL) of the DeFi market have declined in 2024, liquidity remains strong at the beginning of 2025, showing the resilience of the market. For example, Plume Network attracted more than US$4.5 billion in asset commitments before its launch, and TVL reached US$64 million;Uniswap V3 continued to occupy the leading position in the DEX market in early 2025, accounting for more than 40% of the market; The TVL of lending platforms such as Aave and Compound also rebounded in early 2025, especially as Aave’s expansion on Polygon increased its TVL from US$6 billion to US$12 billion.
It is worth noting that Coinbase launched a loan product backed by BTC, which has attracted more mainstream users to enter the DeFi field. In addition, the integration of RWA is also seen as an important growth point in the DeFi market. For example, Tradable and ZKsync have partnered to introduce US$1.7 billion in credit assets into the chain.
