SOL is up and memes are back

This is a segment from the Lightspeed newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe. What a beautiful Wednesday. The sun is shining, the flowers are in bloom, and SOL (for a moment at least) was back above $180. How sweet it is. After lagging behind its own fundamentals for months, Solana’s markets are finally playing catch-up. We’ve had a roughly 21% rally so far this week, with the asset reclaiming territory not seen since Q1, following a sudden spike in retail risk appetite. Solana’s total value locked (TVL) is up 52% month over month, now at $9.5 billion — about 23% short of its all-time high. Data from deBridge shows that about $27.9 million has moved from Ethereum to Solana in the past seven days, while $29.1 million moved in the opposite direction. In other words, Solana posted net bridge outflows to Ethereum of roughly $1.2 million over the week. Of the arriving capital, though, much is landing in the throes of a memecoin supercycle that’s retaken Solana’s DEX ecosystem. $MOODENG is up 562%, $GOAT 190%, and $PNUT 158% on the week. DEX volume hit $9.8 billion on Sunday, the highest in three months, with memecoin trades accounting for ~30%. Interestingly, yesterday marked the first time that tokens launched via pump.fun accounted for less than half of launchpad-sourced memecoin volumes on Solana. Could this signal the start of a true “launchpad war” on the network, with challengers like BonkFun and Believe finally breaking through? While Jupiter, Solana’s flagship aggregator, had spiked to over 72% of all aggregator volume as recently as Monday, its share has since settled to around 55.5% at the time of publication. That’s still more than 1inch, CowSwap, and OKX DEX combined. But how much of that action is driven by bots? Photon, BullX, and Trojan alone have generated over $750 million in revenue across Solana’s DEXs, with full bot revenue over $1.03 billion. Memecoin pumps drive LP demand. LPs boost TVL. TVL boosts protocol rankings and surface area for trading. Bots swarm, DEX metrics rise and Solana appears super duper busy, even if little net-new capital is arriving. This all works beautifully, until it doesn’t. But let’s not catastrophize too heavily over inevitable (?) future nosedives. We’re back in the good ol’ days for now, with fee revenue rising (+108% over 30 days), aggregator usage off the charts, and ecosystem apps like Raydium, Jito, and Kamino nearing or surpassing local highs. Even amid falling stablecoin supply, internal network velocity has more than compensated. Zooming out, the goings-on at macro aren’t exactly hostile either. The S&P 500 has rebounded sharply since April and is now trading just under 5,900, buoyed by cooling inflation and renewed optimism over US-China trade dynamics. The dollar, meanwhile, has softened following lower-than-expected CPI data, easing pressure on risk assets. Bitcoin is holding above $103k, just 4.9% short of its all-time high. Bottom line? Treasure these moments, friend. It’s a rare week where equities, crypto and the broadest of macro sentiment all lean in the same direction. Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters: Source: https://blockworks.co/news/sol-is-up-and-memes-are-back