Did Solana Die With Memecoins? The NYSE Trade Count Explained

Everybody buried Solana when the meme craze died. And then in one week in September, that same dead chain did more trades than the New York Stock Exchange. Because Solana became the meme coin chain, and when meme coins crashed, SOL crashed right after with them. From $293 all the way down to $60 in June. Even Hunter Biden's new meme coin in September didn't bother launching on Solana, and people are literally making videos asking if it's a dead coin.

But since that June low, SOL has [music] bounced around 80%. Wall Street put $133 million into Solana funds in a single week in September, and Western [music] Union is now moving money on it. And it's still around 60% under its high. So, the real question is whether Solana has a use case left without the meme coin gamblers, or whether it really did die with them. And how you play that decides whether this turns into one of the best setups of the cycle, or one more coin you bought right at the top of a bounce and it lost half of your money on it.

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All right, Bull Runners. I'm Ryan Huggins, aka Win with Ryan. Welcome back to the channel. [music] So, to understand why everyone thinks Solana died with meme coins, you first need to understand why Solana and meme coins got tied together in the first place. Solana is a blockchain that's built [music] to be fast and cheap, so a trade on it costs a fraction of a penny. While on Ethereum, [music] the fees could eat up a small bet before you even placed it.

And [music] that made Solana the perfect place for people who wanted to throw $20 or $50 at a brand new coin and see what happened. Then, in early 2024, a site called pump.fund launched on Solana, and it let everyone create their own meme coin a few seconds without even knowing any code. So, millions of new coins got launched there. And to buy any of them, you first needed [music] Solana, which means every time the meme coin craze heated up, people had to buy Solana to get in, and that pushed the price of Solana up with it. And that's exactly how Solana hit its all-time high of $293 on January 19th, 2025, which was the same weekend Donald Trump launched his own meme coin on it.

So, the people buying Solana at the top were mostly buying it to gamble on meme coins. And that's the problem because when your biggest buyers are gamblers, your price only holds up as long as the gambling does. And obviously, the gambling didn't hold up. In December of 2024, the whole meme coin market was worth around $150 billion, and by the middle of September, it was down to around 32 billion. So, it lost around 79% of its value.

And Solana fell from 293 [music] to $60.13 on June 16th, which is a drop of 79.5%, so almost exactly the same as the meme coins themselves. And then, on September 9th, Hunter Biden launched his own meme coin called Laptop, and it crashed around 98% within an hour. But what almost nobody noticed is that he didn't even launch it on Solana. He launched it on Base, which is Coinbase's network. So, even the newest celebrity coin skipped Solana.

And this summer, a brand new blockchain from Robinhood, the stock trading app, even took Solana's crown for daily trading volume for an entire stretch there, until Solana took it back on September 12th. And the strongest version of the bear case comes from Coin Bureau, who argued that the gamblers who made Solana famous will leave the moment action moves somewhere else.

And here's one inconvenient truth for all Solana soldiers out there. Degens were never loyal to Solana alone. They're loyal to wherever the action is thickest. Solana's tech is great, yes, but that was never its real edge. It beat out so many other L1s because it had the gravity to pull in on-chain activity [music] and keep it there.

So, it's easy to call Solana dead, except from September 14th [music] to the 20th, Solana handled 208 million trades, and the New York Stock Exchange handled 189 million. According to the Solana Foundation's own tracker, that's the first time a blockchain has ever done more trades in a week than the New York [music] Stock Exchange. But, the people calling Solana dead still have a real point because that's a count of trades, not dollars. [music] And the man who posted it works for the Solana Foundation and built the tracker himself, so he's hardly neutral. And [music] the average trade on Solana is only around $100, while on Nasdaq, it's thousands of dollars. On top of that, about $118 million of those 208 million trades went through pump.fun, and pump.fun has taken in over $300 million in fees so far this year.

So, the meme coin gambling never actually stopped. So, meme coins are still more than half of what happens on Solana, and that's exactly why its price fell so hard when they crashed. But, if meme coins were the only thing keeping Solana alive, SOL wouldn't have bounced around 80% since June while meme coins stayed down. So, something else is holding it up, and it's coming from people who have nothing to do with meme coins. From September 21st to the 25th, the Solana ETFs, which are the funds that let anyone buy SOL through a normal brokerage account, took in $118 million, their biggest week in around 10 months.

More than $110 million of that went [music] into one fund, Bitwise's Solana staking ETF, and its CEO summed up the mood in one line. That fund also stakes [music] its SOL, which means it lends its coins to help run the network and gets paid in new SOL for doing it. And funds like this are how the slower, more patient money gets in, even if the flows have cooled off in October. Then, there's Forward Industry, a company listed on the Nasdaq that now holds about 8.5 million Solana, which makes it the biggest Solana treasury company. And at the end of August, the people staking SOL voted to cut how fast the new SOL gets created, which the people who wrote the proposal say keeps around 18.9 million SOL from ever being created over the next 6 years.

It only passed with a 67% vote when it needed 66.67, and when I recorded this, it still hadn't been switched on, but it shows the people holding SOL are thinking long-term. But funds and companies stockpiling SOL are one thing, and the buyer that I'd watch most closely is the payment company. Because that's real money moving on Solana that has nothing to do with meme coin. Western Union even tested Ripple back in 2018 and called [music] it too expensive, and on May 4th this year, it launched its own digital dollar called USDPT, and it picked Solana to run it on. So, it can now settle money with its agents around the world at any hour of the day on the same chain everyone said was only good for meme coins.

And the reason Western Union picked Solana is because payment money goes wherever it's cheapest and fastest [music] the same way coin bureau said the gamblers do. Then on September 23rd, a Canadian dollar stablecoin called CADD went live on Solana backed by a group that includes National Bank of Canada [music] and Shopify. It also runs on Ethereum and a few other chains. So Solana isn't the only road it uses, but it's one of them. And Solana is testing an upgrade called Apple and Glow that aims to cut the time that it takes [music] a payment to become final from several seconds to around 150 milliseconds, which is about the length of [music] a blink.

When I recorded this, it was only running on test networks and the developers were saying the real thing is coming soon, [music] but still hadn't named a date. So no, Solana didn't die with meme coins, but it's also not out of the woods because the gamblers are still most of its trades and the new money is only just starting to show up. So how do you actually play a coin the whole market wrote off? That's already bounced this hard off the bottom. Well, the market has buried [music] Solana before back in 2022 bear market and the Funstrats head of digital asset strategy, Shawn Farrell, laid out how bad it got.

If you go back to the depths of the 2022 bear market, you know, you had Solana which was coming off of its position as one of the standout assets of the cycle, rose from, you know, virtually nothing to $260 and fell as low as eight. After FTX collapse, most people called Solana dead in the water. And from around $8, it went on to set that $293 high. That doesn't mean that it does it again and anyone who promises [music] you that repeat is guessing. The risks are real, too, because over half of its trades are still meme coins.

Robinhood's chain has millions of customers behind it and [music] the supply cut isn't live yet. And Solana's network has gone down before, most recently for about 5 hours in February of 2024, [music] I learned what happens without a plan back in 2017 when I turned about $2,000 into $15,000 [music] and then gave it nearly all back on the way down because I had bought on hype and never decided how much [music] was too much. So, if you want Solana in your portfolio, it goes in as one part of a bigger plan, never as one big bet. The investors who handle this well [music] pick their total first, then they build it in four or five smaller pieces spread out over a couple of months. So, a red week lets them [music] pick up the next piece cheaper, and a green week means that they're already on the way up.

And after a coin bounces [music] 80% off the bottom, it's even more important because buying it all at once is exactly how people end up buying the top of [music] a bounce. From there, the things worth your attention are the supply cut actually switching on, Solana's Breakpoint conference in London from November 15th to the 17th, and a real launch date for AlpenGlow, and none of those should ever rush you into a decision. And this isn't the first time that we've seen this play out on Solana because back on June 15th when SOL was around $74 and everyone was calling it dead, we put out a video saying the exact opposite. While the media has been running stories that Solana is dead, Goldman Sachs sold their position, and the chart has been bleeding red for almost a year, Solana quietly owns 65% of the AI economy,

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and Solana is around $100 as I'm recording this. And inside our private intelligence network, our research team flagged Hyperliquid as a high-cap gem back in January 2025 at $26.90, and today it's trading at the $80 range. So, more than three times higher. That same research process has also helped our members get results like these, like Albert, who was up over $2,700 on his Solana in September. Now, these results are, of course, not typical, So don't be typical.

Crypto carries risk and this is just a YouTube video. So do your own research. But the reason our members see moves like this early is because my research team reads what's actually happening underneath the chart, like who's buying and why, long before it shows up on this channel. And we also show members how to put what they're already holding to work and there are live calls each week on when to add and when to take some profit. Obviously not financial advice, just education.

But [music] we keep the network small on purpose because my team works with each member one-on-one directly, so we can't take on a lot of people. So if you're interested, click the first link in the description down below, watch the free briefing that goes over all the details. Bring a pen and paper cuz you'll need it. And if it makes sense, book a call with my team. We'll go through what you're holding and then give you an honest read.

And if it's not a good fit, then we'll be straight with you. As always, you know what to do. Stay bullish. I'll see you at the top.

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