Solana Meme Coins Tank as Smart Money Pours into ETH & High-Conviction Alts
Dogwifhat season is over—traders are dumping speculative Solana tokens for Ethereum and fundamentals-driven plays. Here’s why the rotation matters.
### The Great Meme Coin Unwind
Solana’s joke tokens are bleeding out as liquidity migrates up the risk curve. No more ‘number go up’ magic for degens chasing 100x memes.
### ETH Absorbs the Flows
Ethereum’s ecosystem is hoarding capital like a Wall Street ETF—layer-2 activity spikes while SOL-based gambles collect dust. Even ‘boring’ DeFi bluechips are outperforming.
### Quality Over Meme Hype
VC-backed altcoins with actual roadmaps (gasp!) are mooning as traders finally pretend to care about tokenomics. Who knew ‘utility’ would make a comeback?
### The Bottom Line
When even crypto bros start acting like responsible investors, you know the market’s growing up—or just prepping for the next rug pull. Always follow the money… until it disappears.
Ethereum attracts institutional interest
It follows a spike in institutional interest in ETH, as $10.87 billion in total has flowed into Ethereum ETFs while public treasury companies have acquired more than $14 billion. Ethereum ETFs and strategic reserves now account for almost 8% of ETH’s total supply.
“Our institutional clients are becoming increasingly fundamental-discerning and quality-focused,” Shannon explained. “The emerging narrative is ETH as the backbone for institutional capital moving on-chain: Ethereum combines a long operating history, zero downtime, and leading decentralization and liquidity.”
As such, the best performing assets on the day are projects like the purpose-built real-world asset network Provenance Blockchain, which has jumped 10.2%. Over the week, other “quality-focused” projects have seen the largest gains, like the stablecoin issuer Ethena, which spiked 40.5 in the past seven days%.
“Solana meme coins are down and marking one of the sharpest sector declines, while higher-liquidity altcoins are drawing flows,” Jamie Elkaleh, Chief Marketing Officer at Bitget Wallet, told Decrypt.
Elkaleh added that the pattern “points to a clear capital shift: traders are trimming exposure to the highest-beta, thin-liquidity bets and reallocating into deeper markets with stronger narratives and institutional participation, especially ahead of macro events like the U.S. CPI print.”
That said, volume in the Solana trenches saw a steady increase over the past seven days, according to Dune data, spiking to $235 million in daily volume across token launchpads on Monday. The increase has occurred amid a battle for market share between token launchpads, with Pump.fun reclaiming its crown on Wednesday.
Still, per CoinGecko, Solana is down just 0.5% on the day as the third-worst-performing asset in the top 10 cryptocurrencies—behind XRP, which set a new all-time high last month, and Dogecoin.
“Although memecoins remain the most actively traded assets on Solana DEXs, their share has recently dropped to 44% from a mid-July peak of 73%,” Illia Otychenko, Lead Analyst at crypto exchange CEX.IO, told Decrypt. “This indicates waning interest even within the Solana ecosystem, which could be the catalyst behind their contraction.”
