Another day, another memecoin. What started as an amusing (and sometimes profitable) way of celebrating internet weirdness while bringing some retail investors into the market has since become a noose around the neck of the industry. Of all the networks troubled by the rise of unfettered fraud that worthless memecoin launches bring, Solana has perhaps suffered the most. Originally a promising chain during the 2020-2021 cycle, focused primarily on NFTs, Solana avoided most (but not all) of the bad actor riff-raff, who still had their beady eyes laser-focused on BSC.
That is no longer the case.
These days, Solana is rife with more scams than a pyramid marketing convention. It seems that the network that wanted to bring blockchain to the people clearly brought it to too many people. With its new Token-2022 program, Solana made it easier than ever to create tokens. Sadly, this opened the floodgates to scammer developers in the process. This got even worse with the launch of pump.fun in January 2024 and the rampant slew of low-caliber rug-pull memes that followed.
Thankfully, the site seems to now be on its last legs due to a run of high-profile scandals and stunts, including a man pretending to kill himself live onstream, and lawsuits. The last of these provides an illuminating showcase into the mind of memecoin investors, given that the law firm’s own mock wallet name submitted on legal documents was turned into a pump.fun token, running to $23 million.
Pump.fun itself has made no attempt to prevent these scams. Why would they? They have made over half a billion dollars in fees from the launches. But it’s not just pump.fun launches sticking a thorn in Solana’s side. By early last year (and it’s gotten way worse since then), half of all Solana presales were scams.
Now, of course, none of the above is exactly Solana’s fault. However, shitcoins won’t stop being a thing until exchanges stop listing them, KOLs stop promoting them, and people stop buying them. This is all very unlikely to happen while there’s money left on the table. However, all of the bad press is starting to harm the network, with many claiming that Solana should be doing more to stop memecoin scams.
This includes popular crypto X influencer DonAlt, who lamented how: “SOL went from beloved to hated quickly only because everyone on the chain lost all their money to scams” continuing to add that: “Normally I would argue it’s not really the fault of the people in charge of SOL. But there were many that voiced concerns that there was a scam culture on the chain early on.”
It seems that Solana turned a blind eye in its efforts to become big, but in doing so, flew too close to the memecoin sun, allowing the very thing that made it famous in the first place to start burning the chain down. By allowing scam free-for-alls, as well as literally anyone and everyone, to launch whatever they like on the platform (including President Trump and his wife), the chain has become a joke among serious investors, causing many to move away from it as they turn their backs on memecoins in general.
Indeed, while writing this very article, football icon Ronaldinho released his own memecoin called STAR10, which has already been flagged for suspicious activity. According to the legendary player, the token was apparently released “in celebration of passion and greatness,” which, to be fair, has a better ring to it than “to be a pointless cash-grab.”
Goliath might well be falling, but that doesn’t mean other network giants are faring much better as memecoin trash continues to stink up the space. Indeed, many serious projects are finding themselves struggling to find investors willing to stick around due to frayed nerves.
Recently launched Binance Alpha, for example — created to help spotlight promising early-stage projects with the potential for future listings on CEX giant Binance itself — saw a sharp decline for over 40% of the tokens launched through the incentive. Other chains are struggling under the weight of memecoin issues, too. Less than a year after its launch, Base discovered that one of its six meme launches was a blatant scam.
The good news is that crypto, as a whole, will likely recover from the memecoin damage. But whether Solana can shake off its scam image and be reborn from the flames of its past mistakes — or fully crash and burn like other networks such as Cronos — remains to be seen.
