The 47th President of the United States, Donald Trump, just days before being sworn into office, launched a memecoin on Solana that peaked at nearly $80 billion in fully diluted valuation (FDV) and created hundreds of new millionaires overnight. This is only one of the over 10 million tokens created leveraging Metaplex infrastructure and the Token Metadata standard, but it signifies the bigger picture happening behind the scenes.

Blockchains have created the possibility of tokenizing everything, and memecoins represent the tokenization of attention, a scarce resource in current times that risk-tolerant traders have deemed valuable. 

Even though memecoins are largely driven by speculative fervor, this phenomenon shouldn’t be demonized. There is a clear appetite among users outside the crypto circle to trade tokens tied to specific people, characters, or memes, and blockchains are still exploring paths to broader adoption.

This was evident following the Trump token launch, where users swapped over $1.25 billion in volume and completed 10 million transactions in a single day on Phantom, a Solana wallet. Such robust activity creates the perfect environment to stress-test the chain, not just in theory but in practice, preparing it for the next wave of users and emerging use cases.

Today we’re going to look into the power of the Attention Economy and why recognizing trends has been the center of speculation and value transfer in the current onchain economy.

Compared to traditional markets, memecoins have exhibited extremely high price volatility in the already volatile crypto market. This has made them a popular opportunity among risk-tolerant retail traders and investors, leading to explosive interest and creating a self-perpetuating attention loop fueled by the “Fear Of Missing Out” (FOMO).

When these coins achieve remarkable gains, traders often share their returns on social media platforms like Twitter, which in turn attracts new traders into the memecoin market, spurring the creation of numerous new projects aiming to replicate that success.

While memecoins are largely driven by speculative fervor, they act as both a cultural phenomenon, showcasing the power of memes and social momentum, and as a financial experiment. In a world flooded with content, they can quickly transform passing curiosity into collective obsession and a new experiment pushing the boundaries of how we define value and who gets to create it.

The Attention Economy

The most valuable commodity in the world is attention. Objects, ideas, and information derive meaning only when human attention assigns value to them. In an age of abundance, where goods and knowledge are readily available, attention has become a scarce resource—one that drives mindshare and determines significance.

This scarcity underpins economic theories like the Attention Economy, which views human attention as a resource to be maximized for creating greater value. Introduced by Herbert Simon in 1971 and further developed by Thomas H. Davenport in his 2006 book, The Attention Economy, the theory highlights the growing necessity of capturing and directing attention in an increasingly competitive and content-saturated environment.

Memecoins, in many ways, represent a challenge to this status quo. They reflect a movement where people seek to reclaim the value of their attention, a resource freely handed to corporations and social platforms, generating immense shareholder value while leaving users to squander this precious commodity on mindless scrolling and content that often lacks personal or societal enrichment.

As a type of cryptocurrency inspired by memes, internet trends, or celebrities, they derive their value from cultural relevance, social media visibility, and community participation. Fueled by virality and the ephemeral nature of attention, they capitalize on their intuitiveness, making them highly persuasive to market participants, transforming fleeting moments of focus into tangible economic activity.

Financial Nihilism

This vision aligns with the growing sense of financial nihilism among Generation Z, a generation raised during periods of economic instability. They have developed a deep skepticism toward the traditional financial system, which they perceive as lacking intrinsic value. This view is further reinforced by the realities of skyrocketing living costs, dwindling opportunities for upward mobility, and an unsustainable disparity between median home prices and median incomes.

As this financial nihilism intensifies, individuals, excluding a privileged few, gravitate toward riskier assets. While high-risk investments like Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana were once the go-to destinations, the diminishing prospects of generating massive returns have driven traders toward increasingly volatile assets. 

Memecoins offer a stark contrast to traditional finance. Their simplicity, decentralized nature, and potential for fair distribution provide an alternative to the typical low float, high FDV tokens that traders have grown weary of. They represent a shift toward more inclusive and socially driven forms of digital finance, where communities, rather than institutions, drive value creation.

Powered by Metaplex

Solana has consistently demonstrated its ability to achieve product-market fit and adoption across various use cases, thanks to its unparalleled performance. With blocks finalized in under 400 milliseconds and the capacity to process up to 4,000 user transactions per second (TPS), Solana stands out as one of the fastest blockchains and looking ahead, the arrival of Firedancer is expected to push this scalability even further, with forecasts projecting an astonishing 1 million TPS. 

Combined with low transaction fees, Solana not only delivers exceptional speed and capacity but also democratizes access, making the chain truly accessible to everyone and fostering widespread adoption.

These qualities make Solana an ideal platform for memecoins, where high throughput and low costs can mean the difference between success and failure for traders. It’s no coincidence that Pump.fun, the leading token factory of this cycle, has found its home on Solana. Since its creation in March 2024, Pump.fun has generated over $440 million in fees and launched 6.2 million tokens, solidifying Solana as the blockchain of choice for this booming market.

Practically all token launchpads on Solana such as Pump.fun and others, use Metaplex programs and tools to create assets and attach metadata to what would otherwise be simple onchain addresses. This metadata makes tokens readable on explorers, wallets, and accessible to anyone, adding a critical layer of usability to the ecosystem.

While most people know Metaplex as the “Solana NFT standard”, it has also emerged as a key beneficiary of the extraordinary growth in fungible tokens on Solana. November marked a new protocol all-time high (ATH) with 1.4 million fungible tokens minted, and the trend shows no signs of slowing, with January on pace to surpass the previous record.

*: Fungible Tokens minted as of 22 January

This surge in activity not only highlights Metaplex’s role in enabling the onchain economy but also directly drives its protocol fees. Since November’s asset ATH, Metaplex has recorded two consecutive months of revenue exceeding $3 million, with January on track to achieve the same milestone.

Of this revenue, 50% is allocated each month to purchasing $MPLX for the Metaplex DAO to power ecosystem initiatives like Grants and Hackathons.

*: Revenue as of 22 January

Conclusion

The 24-hour news cycle often prioritizes surface-level narratives over a deeper exploration of the root causes behind emerging phenomena. This rush to draw oversimplified, negative correlations tends to overshadow a more nuanced understanding.

Beneath the speculative fervor, memecoins can be seen as a movement rejecting traditional norms; a collective effort to reclaim the financial and attention power that has been handed over to centralized institutions and platforms.