Meme Coin Retreat Myth: P young players either turn or roll

Author: Arain, ChainCatcher

The midsummer belonging to Meme is being declared over.

From the collapse of the Trump family's $TRUMP to the Argentine presidential platform, the $Libra scam that saw Meme as the core driving force for on-chain transactions was exposed. Solana, which regarded Meme as the core driving force for on-chain transactions, cut halved the number of new coins issued daily, and the number of head Meme coins fell by more than 70% year-on-year to date... All signs show that Meme, a bubble with a total market value of nearly US$60 billion, has also begun to show cracks.

Investors such as Matt Hougan, Dragonfly managing partner Haseeb Qureshi, Castle Island Ventures partner Nic Carter and other investors have recently expressed their views on short Meme's future market.

"I still can't lie down and have to do something," Philo said in an interview with ChainCatcher. Philo claims to be a young player P. Not long ago, he publicly stated that he had successfully gone ashore and cleared all Meme assets. However, he was not calm when he should have been lying flat. Philo told ChainCathcer reporter that the next step is to decide to start a business and build a platform to short Memecoin.

This decision means that Philo breaks away from the identity of "P young player" and achieves identity transformation. Philo's transformation is a microcosm of the millions of young players in the context of the sudden cold Memecoin market.

Meme coins encounter " **Waterloo " and P young player reaches a

crossroads**

According to Google Trends, the global search popularity of "Memecoin" fell sharply after reaching its peak in January, shrinking by nearly 60% by the end of February. Coingecko statistics show that the overall decline of the Meme sector in the past 7 days ranks among the top 10 assets in the worst performance in the entire crypto market. Well-known Memes such as TRUMP and MELANIA have all fallen by more than 70% year-on-year. Even blue-chip Meme coins DOGE and SHIB have recorded negative returns.

Meme's secondary market performed poorly, and the on-chain market also fell into a sluggish state. Dune Analytics shows that the daily trading volume of Meme coin issuing platform pump.fun 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 shrinkage of more than 50%.

Faced with the Meme ebb, Matt Hougan, chief investment officer of Bitwise, publicly stated: "…In the past year, Memecoin has been the hottest sector in the cryptocurrency field outside of Bitcoin. Removing Memecoin from the crypto ecosystem will have an impact, and that's what you see today."

Philo was once a young player in the past Memecoin wealth creation trend, and chose to retreat bravely at this point in time. But few people can imagine that this 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 just received a notice of withdrawal recently.

"I haven't been in school most of the time, so I received an exit notice. I went to college and found a job in the future. My actual experience told me that it is easier to achieve the goal of making money in the Crypto circle -you may make money that many people can earn in decades or even in their lifetime in a certain year," Philo told ChainCatcher reporters.

Philo's experience is full of drama. As a civil engineering student, he loves to learn programming by himself. In fact, in the past few cycles, Philo bluntly stated that he had seized the opportunities of DeFi and NFT and was most satisfied with making money with Github accounts. This made him realize that "this is a cost-free but huge profits." So he went further and further on the road of programming and cryptocurrency. He said that he had won several Hackers awards.

However, the gold mine dug in the Memecoin wave this time made him feel like he could take a break.

Why choose to leave the identity of P young player at this time? Philo said it was his intuition that told him to do this, "I have investment experience and entrepreneurial experience. My experience told me that whether it is investment or entrepreneurship, it is not just technology and vision, but luck also accounts for a large part."

Leaving the identity of a young player, Philo's life was calm for a while. "The sense of comfort, happiness and security have been improved." But after less than half a month of rest, Philo couldn't sit still. He focused on entrepreneurship and said that he was developing two projects, one was Bitcoin stablecoin, and the other was a platform for shorting Memecoin. "I think shorting Memecoin is an opportunity. There are many platforms in the market that help Memecoin longs make money, but there is still a lack of opportunities to give shorts also make money. "For me, whether entrepreneurship is what I want to do and its positive effect on the industry is higher than profit. Even if the loss is due to entrepreneurship, it can be considered to be a 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 P Marshal. In an interview with ChainCatcher, KOL@ YuYue said that my life has not changed much, "but I will focus more on life, watching more new projects, and making friends. In the subsequent market, I will still actively pay attention to the Meme track and various emerging on-chain alphas, because this form of asset issuance itself has transcended the cultural concept of Meme, so I am very optimistic that in the future, on-chain assets and on-chain Meme will continue to have more opportunities, and then choose the opportunity to act."

Davis double kill crisis: bubble burst and Solana sell-off

The young players of P walked to the intersection and made different choices, which was related to their judgment on the future market.

Although data shows that Memecoin has begun to cool down, Yuyue does not think the story of the Meme track has been completed.

"I think this change is a natural phenomenon, but it means that the 'low tide' or the end of the track. In fact, the entire Meme frenzy has basically lasted for more than a year. It has been more than a year since Memes such as WIF and BOME last year. This cycle and vitality have basically far exceeded all other branch tracks, so the entire Meme track has fallen into an emotional trough, which I think is a normal phenomenon." She said in the interview.

In the past period of time, the Meme currency's out-of-circle effect has mainly relied on celebrity coins. Because celebrity coins often have a certain fan base and stronger topicality, the famous human Meme coins are more likely to become popular. But success is Xiao He, and failure is Xiao He. Meme was pushed to a climax because of its popularity in celebrity coins, and was criticized for its celebrity coins. The Trump family's TRUMP collapse and Libra scam have accelerated the collapse of market confidence in Memecoin.

Treeverse founder Loopify publicly stated: "Meme coins are like NFTs in the last bull market, with only bubbles left after the tide recedes." Taking TRUMP token as an example, its market value once soared to $70 billion, but after the truth of the lack of actual 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 reasons retail investors were keen on playing Meme was to fight against VC Coin, but to this day, retail investors have become the injured party.

“People seem to realize the nature of Meme promoters and how these massive Meme coins are being released are bad for retail investors… There is doubt about how Meme coins work, and it is also 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: "New retail investors have basically been cut off."

In addition to the beginning of Meme's own bubble, the market gradually shifted to some more conservative asset attributes, which put Meme coins in a dilemma similar to "Davis double kill". Since January 2025, the net inflow of Bitcoin ETF funds has reached US$43 billion, while Solana, the main base of Meme coins, has exceeded US$12 billion in capital outflows during the same period. In addition, Solana faces pressure to unlock 11.2 million SOLs on the upcoming March 1. These tokens are sold to institutions at a low price by FTX bankruptcy liquidation assets, and the cost is only 30%-40% of the market price. The market is worried that it will trigger a wave of selling after unlocking. The decline in Solana's price will further drive the price of a number of Memes that use it as its main position to fall.

However, YuYue pointed out to ChainCatcher, "In fact, other tracks in the entire environment, including the ecology, defi, etc. of various public chains, are not that optimistic. The core reason for the sluggish market is liquidity, which is a problem facing all tracks and ecology in the currency circle at present."

Meme Players ' Second Half: Either Collect or Turn

Where should Meme players go in the second half?

On February 19, during the Consensus HK, at the "Trends and Rhythm of the New Cycle of Web3" event organized by RootDtata and ChainCatcher, Cooking.city partner & EVG co-founder Kyle, Paper Venture investor 0xbing, Crypto KOL YuYue, Asian on chain founder Vand Ni, and OKX Web3 product manager Leo Li held a roundtable conversation around the theme of "The Advancement Road of Meme and P Young Players". In this roundtable conversation, he made an outlook on Meme's future market.

One consensus is that Meme's second half will be a more complicated and more difficult PVP battlefield. Among them, YuYue believes that Meme may have longer vitality than most narratives, and forces the market to rethink its valuation system. In the second half, it is a more cruel PVP battlefield. Everyone needs to find their own positioning, while Leo Li believes that it is necessary to reduce the transaction frequency. High-frequency PVP is too challenging for many ordinary players.

Meme has also spawned some other gameplay. For example, Time.fun, which tokenize "time", Monsters.fun, which integrates AI agents and gaming economy, Nad.fun, which introduces anti-MEV mechanisms and social points airdrops, etc., continue to join the lineup of exploring Meme 2.0.

But maybe like the once glorious narratives on the market, DeFi Summer did not appear after DeFi 2.0, and the inscription market did not welcome Inscription 2.0 after the winter. The new narrative captured by the market may be opened elsewhere.

And there are not only Meme and celebrity coins on the chain. According to Dune data, the three narratives of Derivatives, FriendTech and RWA have begun to outperform the market year-to-date.

Behind the three narratives is the rhythm of institutional funds entering the market.

Among them, RWA, as a trillion-dollar track under the wave of compliance, has attracted large institutions to the end in the past year. DefiLlama data shows that the RWA sector TVL (total locked value) exceeded US$80 billion in Q1 2025, a year-on-year increase of 300%. Traditional institutions such as BlackRock and Fidelity have entered the market to make arrangements, and the stablecoin bill promoted by the US Congress will further promote the compliance process.

The DeFi market began to show signs of recovery at the beginning of this year. According to Messari's report, despite a decline in transaction volume and total lock-in value (TVL) in the DeFi market in 2024, liquidity remained strong in early 2025, showing market resilience. For example, Plume Network attracted more than $4.5 billion in asset commitments before it went online, with TVL reaching $64 million; Uniswap V3's trading volume in early 2025 continued to occupy the leading position in the DEX market, accounting for more than 40% of the market share; TVL for lending platforms such as Aave and Compound also rebounded in early 2025, especially Aave's expansion on Polygon increased its TVL from $6 billion to $12 billion.

It is worth noting that Coinbase launched a loan product with BTC as collateral, attracting more mainstream users to enter the DeFi field. In addition, RWA integration is also seen as an important growth point in the DeFi market. For example, Tradable and ZKsync cooperate to introduce $1.7 billion in credit assets to the chain.