President Donald Trump’s Friday tariff announcement has put the market in shock, with crypto mostly being in the red across the board. But some meme coins are still in the green, fighting against the macro pressures because some degens never stopped clicking “buy.”
Meme coins, as categorized by CoinGecko, are down 11.3% over the past 24 hours, 29% over the past week. The specific chain hit the worst was Ethereum layer-2 Base meme coins, down 7.3% this week followed by Solana meme coins down 4.4%.
“Most people I know are getting slaughtered,” pseudonymous trader 0xWinged, who also deployed Sharkcat, told Decrypt. “A lot of group chats are dead right now. Sentiment is so trash.”
Still, according to Dune data, 53,248 tokens were created on popular launchpad Pump.fun on Saturday—just a 9.7% downturn compared to the previous Saturday. While the market is in fear, some traders in the trenches are finding ways to flip a profit off this feeling.
“A lot of people have just resorted to trading low cap shitters, there are still $5 million market cap runners every day,” 0xWinged said. “Most of the coins that run are attached to negative emotions.”
Over the weekend, for example, a token referring to hanging yourself in order to die by suicide called Rope (ROPE) ran to a $6 million market cap. According to DEX Screener, 15 traders profited more than $10,000 each on the coin. That said, meme coins are heavily volatile and create just as many losers with 12 traders currently in the red for more than $10,000.
“It’s because everyone shares that negative, trash sentiment,” 0xWinged said. “People are suicidal in this market. Joke or not, the emotion is shared.”
Equally, at the time of writing, McDonald’s McValue (MCVALUE) has recently shot up to an $824,000 market cap, with the top trader profiting $3,600. The token is yet to dip to create any major losers, but with the short shelf life of most meme coins it likely will create some soon.
Only one of the top 10 meme coins isn’t in the red over the past 24 hours, with Fartcoin (FARTCOIN) rising 36%.
Worst hit is Dogwifhat (WIF) down 23%, after a Sphere representative told Decrypt that there is no deal to advertise the token on its Las Vegas venue on Friday. SPX6900 (SPX) is also down 9%, Pepe (PEPE) 15%, and Official Trump (TRUMP) 10%.
After Fartcoin, Base cat coin Toshi (TOSHI) is the largest meme coin in the green, which has jumped 33%. Following that, AI Rig Complex (ARC), a Solana-based AI meme coin, has climbed 43% and Popcat (POPCAT) has bounced 14.5%.
Meme coins are highly volatile crypto assets with no real underlying value, as such buying and selling them is extremely risky. With this, many meme coins die shortly after being created leaving tons of people losing money while a smaller number get away with a healthy profit.
“I think AI and non memecoins are the play right now, although some large [meme coins] are on a discount,” 0xWinged added. “But I think the best risk reward for the average investor is obviously buying coins with fundamentals. 99% of people get killed in the trenches anyway.”
Edited by Stacy Elliott.
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