After Trump's team issued $TRUMP, Melania Trump's $MELANIA and the Central African Republic's $CAR have also been launched. The most controversial one now is Argentina President's $LIBRA, which seems to be the trigger for the collapse of the meme coin frenzy.
As more and more meme coins have become tools for insider trading and market manipulation, the scandals in the meme coin market have been escalating, with prices uniformly showing a pattern of sharp rises followed by crashes, and the market's speculative enthusiasm has begun to cool. This trend is also reflected in the price of Solana (SOL), the headquarters of meme coins.
SOL Plummets to 174 USD
According to Binance spot data, SOL fell from $186.94 last night to a low of $174.63, and had a slight rebound to $178.05 before the deadline, a drop of 4.4% in the last 24 hours, making it the worst performing token among the top 30 coins by market cap.
Trader Tyler tweeted that "the market is unleashing its fury on Solana." He cited data from Binance perpetual contracts, indicating that the ratio of short positions to long positions has risen to 4:1, reflecting a clear bearish sentiment in the market towards Solana.
Who Harvested the Solana Meme Coin Market?
The Solana meme coin market has been "milked" of billions of dollars by various institutions, trading bots, and insiders. According to statistics from defillama founder 0xngmi, the total profits obtained by different participants in the Solana meme coin market are as follows:
- Trading bots and applications: $1.09 billion
- Pump.fun platform: $492 million
- MEV (Maximum Extractable Value): $15-20 billion
- Trump-related insiders: $5-10 billion
- Other insiders: Unknown
- AMMs (Automated Market Makers): $0-20 billion
He stated that the total amount is over $36 to $66 billion. This also reflects the high speculative nature of the meme coin market, where much of the profits are not enjoyed by ordinary investors, but are instead captured by high-frequency traders, arbitrageurs, and insiders.
Analyst: ETH/BTC May Have Bottomed Out
As Solana is impacted by the meme coin crisis, the market seems to be shifting its attention to Ethereum. Three Arrows Capital (3AC) co-founder Zhu Su tweeted yesterday that it's time to go all-in on Ethereum.
CoinPanel CEO Aran Hawker told CoinDesk that Ethereum's recent rally is not a true outperformance, but more like a price return to its fair level. He further stated:
Some traders may be shifting funds from SOL back to ETH, but the market trend and structure have not changed significantly, and this rally is likely to be quickly erased if the market sees major changes.
However, LMAX Group market strategist Joel Kruger holds a more optimistic view, believing this could be a signal that the years-long downtrend of ETH against BTC is about to end. He said:
The ETH/BTC ratio has been declining since 2021, but it may now be bottoming out.
We should closely monitor the monthly highs of ETH/BTC, as a successful breakout would strengthen the possibility of a trend reversal.
Before the deadline, the ETH/BTC ratio was temporarily reported at 0.0282, down 1.78% in the last 24 hours, at its lowest level since late 2020.
Furthermore, according to CoinGlass data, market interest in ETH increased significantly yesterday (17th), with the total open interest of futures contracts growing 12% in 24 hours to around $2.6 billion, mainly from Binance and Gate.io, while BTC futures open interest only grew 1%, indicating a flow of funds into ETH.
However, before the deadline, Ethereum had fallen from $2,849.7 yesterday to $2,703.91, a cumulative drop of over 5%, and the future price trend of Ethereum still needs to be closely monitored.
