The recent revival in Solana meme coins comes after activity around Pump.fun, the blockchain’s leading meme coin launchpad, collapsed earlier this year as traders shifted toward other parts of the market. In June, its seven-day graduation rate fell to about 0.26%, an 80% decline over three months, while average daily revenue dropped to roughly $800,000 from about $4.8 million six months earlier.
Yet the infrastructure supporting Solana’s meme-coin economy is active again.
PumpSwap, the decentralized exchange linked to Pump.fun, processed about $16.70 billion in volume over the past 30 days, according to DeFiLlama. Its 30-day fees reached about $56.2 million, while the platform generated roughly $10.5 million in protocol revenue. DeFiLlama’s methodology also filters PumpSwap volume to pools with at least $5,000 in total value locked and 50 unique traders, helping exclude some wash-trading activity.
Pump.Fun fees and revenue chart. Source: DeFiLlama
Pump.fun itself generated about $24.1 million in fees over the latest 30-day period, with approximately $18.5 million classified as protocol revenue. Its tracked DEX volume was about $1.43 billion over the same period.
The question, therefore, is no longer whether money is moving through Solana’s meme infrastructure. It clearly is.
The harder question is who is doing the trading.
Pump.fun Is Showing Signs of Life
The June slowdown established a remarkably weak baseline for Solana’s meme-coin launch market.
A separate academic analysis of 832,941 Pump.fun launches between May 8 and June 10 found that only 0.198% reached graduation within the study’s 24-hour observation window. That was roughly one-third of the 0.63% rate recorded in a comparable September-October 2025 dataset. The researchers found that 1,651 tokens graduated while more than 831,000 timed out.
Pump.fun led application revenue at $10.28 million, followed by Collector Crypt at $2.62 million and Fomo at $2.04 million. Source: @SolanaFloor via X
That makes the recent increase in activity significant, but it does not necessarily mean the market has returned to its previous state.
Pump.fun can generate thousands of launches and substantial transaction activity even when very few tokens develop durable liquidity.
Graduation is therefore more useful than raw launch counts. It measures whether a newly created token can attract enough demand to move beyond the bonding curve and into open DEX liquidity.
The low graduation rate also illustrates the brutal economics of the current meme market: a large amount of activity can coexist with an extremely small number of successful launches.
BONK and WIF Offer a Reality Check
The established Solana meme coins provide a useful benchmark for judging whether the new activity represents a broader revival.
BONK remains one of the largest meme assets native to the Solana ecosystem. Its market capitalization is currently around $265 million, with roughly $34 million in 24-hour trading volume across tracked markets.
More importantly, for the on-chain picture, BONK ranked among Solana’s most actively traded tokens in Bitquery’s latest eight-hour snapshot, with approximately 3,340 unique traders.
dogwifhat (WIF), another established Solana meme benchmark, is currently valued at roughly $144 million to $148 million, depending on the data provider, with about $23 million in 24-hour trading volume on CoinGecko. CoinMarketCap reports more than 251,000 WIF holders.
WIF’s scale is important because it provides a comparison with the newer tokens emerging from the Pump.fun ecosystem. But its large holder base does not necessarily translate into equally large daily active participation.
That distinction matters.
A token can have hundreds of thousands of holders while a much smaller group accounts for most of its daily trading activity.
ANSEM Shows What a New Meme Cycle Could Look Like
The clearest evidence of renewed speculative appetite came from The Black Bull (ANSEM), a newer Solana meme coin launched through the Pump.fun ecosystem.
ANSEM surged sharply in early July, reaching a market capitalization of more than $400 million at its peak before retracing. By July 7, it had gained roughly 299% over seven days and was recording approximately $64.9 million in 24-hour volume, according to CoinGecko data cited at the time. The surge coincided with a broader rebound in Solana meme activity.
Pump.fun and PumpSwap each crossed $1 billion in daily volume on July 4, their first such day since April 8, while Pump.fun recorded its strongest daily token-launch and graduation activity in about 80 days on July 1.
ANSEM has since cooled considerably. The latest CoinMarketCap data puts its market capitalization near $68.5 million, with approximately $14.3 million in 24-hour volume and more than 132,000 holders. The token remains well below its July 6 peak.
But the more interesting figure is its on-chain trader count.
Bitquery’s latest Solana token ranking shows ANSEM with roughly 5,840 unique traders over eight hours, placing it fifth among the tracked tokens in that category. BONK had about 3,340.
That does not prove that ANSEM’s activity represents organic retail demand. But it does show that the newer meme market can attract a surprisingly broad trading population when a token captures attention.
The Bot Problem Makes Volume Harder to Interpret
There is a major complication.
Solana’s low transaction costs and high throughput make it particularly attractive to automated trading systems. A July 2026 academic study examining 586 GitHub bot repositories and 200 Solana bot addresses found that bot-related transactions on decentralized exchanges accounted for more than $250 million in daily trading volume during January 2026. The study covered more than 44 million on-chain transactions and identified 15 categories of bots spanning trading, MEV, and on-chain analytics.
That means headline DEX volume cannot be treated as a direct measure of human speculation.
A $10 million increase in volume could come from thousands of individual traders buying meme coins, but it could also reflect a smaller number of automated systems repeatedly arbitraging, sniping, or repositioning across pools.
This is particularly important for Pump.fun, where speed is often more valuable than conviction.
A separate study examining 166,098 Pump.fun launches and 1.58 million buyer observations identified 1,012 persistent wallet cohorts that repeatedly appeared among early buyers across multiple launches. The researchers cautioned that the pattern did not prove coordinated causality, but it nevertheless demonstrates how repeated wallet behavior can influence the appearance of early-stage demand.
Graduation Rates Tell a Different Story
If Solana were entering a broad second meme-coin cycle, one would expect more than rising turnover.
There should also be evidence that more launches are surviving.
So far, that evidence remains limited.
The May-June Pump.fun dataset found a pooled 24-hour graduation rate of just 0.198%. The study also found that launching advertising on Telegram, X, and websites had substantially higher graduation probabilities than launching without those social signals, while higher initial market capitalization—used as a proxy for creator self-buying—was also associated with greater graduation probability.
In other words, the market is not simply rewarding any token that attracts transactions.
Successful launches remain an extremely small minority.
That makes the recent increase in PumpSwap volume more difficult to interpret. The ecosystem may be experiencing a genuine increase in speculative activity, but much of that capital could still be concentrated among traders cycling rapidly between a relatively small number of successful tokens.
Is Retail Really Coming Back?
The answer from the on-chain data is possible, but not conclusive.
There are genuine signs of renewed activity. PumpSwap is processing billions of dollars in monthly volume. Pump.fun continues to generate tens of millions of dollars in fees. BONK remains one of Solana’s most active meme assets, while newer tokens such as ANSEM have demonstrated the ability to attract thousands of unique traders during short-lived speculative bursts.
PumpSwap DEX volume chart. Source: DeFiLlama
But the market has also become significantly more automated.
The presence of bots, repeated wallet cohorts, and extremely low graduation rates means that transaction counts and DEX volume can exaggerate the strength of the underlying retail market.
The most important signal from here may therefore not be another record day of PumpSwap volume.
Instead, traders should watch whether unique participants, new wallets, sustained liquidity, and graduation rates rise together.
If they do, Solana could be entering a genuine second meme-coin cycle.
If volume rises while the number of successful launches and active human participants remain weak, the market may simply have evolved into a faster machine for moving the same speculative capital from one token to another.
For now, Solana’s meme-coin engine is clearly running again.
Whether more people are actually sitting behind the wheel remains the bigger question.
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