Solana's Memecoins are back. So is everything else.

This week, meme coin trading across Solana has reached levels not seen since last August based purely on the launch of a meme coin with no product, no team and no roadmap.

A dormant traders token dragged them back

ANSEM aka The Black Bull launched on Pump.fun in late June after an anonymous developer gave a sizable amount of supply to Ansem, one of Solana's most boisterous traders.

Rather than ignore it, he embraced it; pledged to donate his Pump.fun creator fees back to the holders on a weekly basis via airdrop. What people were actually buying was that pledge, not any mechanism built into the token.

In three days, the price itself moved approximately 18000% up to peaking at a $449 million market cap on July 07 and dragged the entire meme trade along with it back to life. Blockworks reported that Pump.fun now accounts for $614 million of Solana's total $1.65 billion in daily DEX volume, and memecoins made up 29% of spot DEX volume the week of 20-26 July, up from only 10% to 15% over the previous few weeks. The above occurs with the Fear and Greed Index printing a 29.

And memes will still not be the biggest trade

But here's what blows this easy story: it was not memes that blew in first place.

A further 37% of volume that week was in SOL-stablecoin pairs, and a further 22% plain stablecoin swaps. Combined that's well over half of the chain's spot activity, before one of those meme tokens even gets a vote. This month Solana continued being a memecoin network. It simply placed a meme cycle on an already-inflated base that never left.

The money that never left

The stablecoin and tokenized asset base was exactly that, a base, which continued to expand straight through the 2026 crash, precisely when speculative money tends to run first. In July, stablecoin supply on Solana hit $15 billion, and yet $4.81 billion of this resides in issuers other than USDC and USDT. Western Union launched its USDPT stablecoin on Solana as a settlement layer, and B2C2, an institutional market maker, has named Solana its primary settlement chain for stablecoins: a technical designation based on where trades actually clear, not a marketing partnership.

This is no different from the story told by real-world assets. Solana has a total of 2,582 tokenized assets: the most for any chain by count, with distributed asset value exceeding $3.5 billion. The only chain with more holders is Robinhood Chain, but that is because Robinhood is forcing their own 28 million brokerage users onto one chain. This meant Solana's holder base was coming from a much larger group of issuers building independently.

This is by design: meme volume is a cyclical event. It runs from 29% and back down to single digits the second that ANSEM stops trending, then straight back up when some other ticker is running 300% in a week. The trajectory of Stablecoin supply and RWA counts was the same across that period, including during the weeks when no one was having any fun. Which isn't reversing just because the meme trade cools off again, that's the part of Solana's story.

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