Everyone is talking about memecoins again. My whole timeline is about people showing their pnl or talking about their plays, everyone convinced and invested into it, I feel it inside me too, it's undeniable the pull.
Noise is one of the worst things we create in crypto and when it gets this loud it's easy to feel like we're the only ones losing the hype.
Looking into the data
Before doing anything, as many times before, I decided to look into the data.
Six months of data from pump.fun on Dune shows more than 7 million wallets active with over $38 billion in volume.
56.23% of wallets lost money. For every person who made money, 1.28 people lost it. Which isn't that bad if you think, you just need one person and a half to lose so you can make it, it's worth it you might think.
What the typical trader actually made
Going deeper.
Let's look into the money being made from the typical trader, the exact middle person out of 7 million, they earned $0.
The ones actually being profitable are in the median with an outcome of $0.02. Two cents.
The top 10% of all traders made more than $470 in profit, while the top 1% starts around $21,000.
Winners aren't even human
Now the part more concerning in my opinion.
The single best performing wallet made more than $900 million, and also made almost 15 million trades in six months, which is around 80,000 trades a day, which I guarantee you is impossible for a human, at least from this decade.
The same wallets that keep winning aren't humans operating them, but bots, sniper scripts and infrastructure, catching your buy before you could even humanly know.
And this isn't just a pump.fun thing. This week new data showed the TRUMP token left almost 989,000 buyers with $3.8 billion in losses combined, while insiders extracted around $4 billion. The same story, just at presidential scale.
Not very fair if you ask me, but I know, you know, trading isn't fair, never was, yet I find myself lost in the fact that we have such a strong adoption of it, while the old lottery tickets aren't even a thing these days. The new money we get so excited about once it flows in is going directly into machines. So, why? Why really?
Before you get me wrong
Let me be clear that I am not against memecoins. I have worked with multiple and seen many amazing ones survive. Coins with real communities and stories, and I respect that. What I am against is going in blind or pretending it isn't like this, so we can allow us to dream, or better saying, to mislead us.
Everyone gets blind
And still, everyone gets blind.
Smart people, experienced people, people who have been in crypto for years. I see it everywhere in the industry, the moment the narrative heats up, even people with strong conviction start believing the only move is to fight for that 1% spot. Not because something really changed, but because everyone else is fighting for it, so it must be worth it.
Like, really?
When in human society, especially in modern days, have we seen and experienced that doing what the crowd is doing is the best choice? NEVER
The other side of crypto
Here is what gets me the most really.
The whole other side of crypto where they always make money, despite narratives, but of course benefit even more during heated moments like now.
People like me, community builders, moderators, ghostwriters, designers, artists, researchers, the people actually running many projects everyone trades.
Yet nobody will post a screenshot of a salary or a retainer, maybe they should so we could have some real discussion on this. I have been in this space for four years and everything I earned came from work and from people, not from joining the noise.
The reality is that I'm no exception, I am part of a huge quiet majority that the timeline never shows you. The ones always here regardless of trends. I won't be a hypocrite and say that this majority ignores trends and lives in a whole different world, no, we join, we run on many different waves, always adapting so we can farm some attention and convert it into something meaningful.
But even though this happens so much in this industry, like my own journey of success, I'm not famous, and many others on the same journey, the same.
This one might be easy to answer, but that is due to the fact that the dream will always get all of it. We are a society that only points the camera at what looks glamorous, the lambo, the 100x screenshot, the kid who turned $200 into a million. Yet the almost 4 million wallets that lost money will never be a headline.
The real problem
That is the part that really messes with me. Not that the game is hard, every game is hard and sometimes unfair, but the fact that we have as one of our main flags towards onboarding people, not from the dream of financial freedom through work, but through looking for the exceptions.
If you still want to play, play. Just know exactly which game you entered, and whose seat you are trying to take.
