Solana meme coin trading just posted one of its biggest weeks of the year. Active addresses jumped 38% to 31.4 million, according to DefiLlama data. BNB Chain rode a similar wave, with trading volume climbing 45%. Neither number, however, tells the whole story.
Solana Meme Coin Trading Drives Record Activity
The rally traces back to ANSEM, a Solana-based meme coin that caught fire this month. Traders piled in, and on-chain activity followed. Over seven days, Solana processed 685 million transactions worth $13.63 billion, enough to put it in first place among all chains for weekly activity.
Fee revenue told an even bigger story, reaching $4.06 million for the week, a 70% jump from last year. Weekly protocol revenue hit $422,500, up 21% year over year. Total value locked on Solana climbed to $24.78 billion, up nearly 4% in just seven days.
Each active address averaged about 22 transactions during the week, which suggests plenty of repeat trading from the same wallets. Fees came out to roughly $0.0059 per transaction, cheap enough that high-frequency meme trading barely dents anyone’s balance. That combination, low fees plus repeat traffic, explains why volume can spike so fast on Solana.
Why BNB Chain Is Riding the Same Wave
BNB Chain saw a smaller but related bump, fueled by trading in tokens like TCC and CZ. Twenty-four-hour trading volume climbed from $240 million to $350 million, a 45% increase. Active addresses reached 8.3 million, alongside 96.7 million transactions, up 3.5% year over year.
Fees on BNB Chain totaled $182,000 for the week, far less than Solana’s haul. Each address made about 11.6 transactions on average, roughly half of Solana’s pace. Put simply, Solana traders are moving faster and more often, even though both networks are riding the same meme coin wave.
What the Solana Meme Coin Trading Numbers Really Show
This isn’t Solana’s first meme-driven spike, and it likely won’t be the last. Back in March 2024, the Book of Meme frenzy pushed daily on-chain volume above $3.79 billion and briefly let Jupiter outpace Uniswap in daily trading. History suggests these bursts fade once attention shifts elsewhere.
Meme coins aren’t a permanent fixture of Solana’s trading volume, either. Galaxy Research found they made up about 30% of Solana’s decentralized exchange volume in late 2025, down from roughly 60% earlier that year. The same research pegged the average meme token holding period at just 100 seconds.
Pump.fun, the launchpad behind much of this activity, accounted for 40% to 67% of all Solana decentralized exchange transactions in recent research. Fewer than 2% of tokens launched in the fourth quarter of 2024 ever made it onto a major exchange. Most meme coins simply vanish after their moment in the spotlight.
The Research Behind the Skepticism
A separate cross-chain study looked at roughly 35,000 meme tokens across Ethereum, BNB Smart Chain, Solana, and Base. Among tokens that returned more than 100%, 82.8% showed signs of wash trading or liquidity pool manipulation. That finding matters because it suggests a lot of the volume behind these rallies isn’t organic.
None of this means Solana meme coin trading is fake or worthless. It does mean the headline numbers deserve a second look before anyone calls them proof of lasting adoption.
Solana Meme Coin Trading and the Sustainability Question
Real tests come after the hype fades. If active addresses, fees, and total value locked keep climbing once ANSEM cools off, that points to genuine growth. If they collapse instead, this week just joins a long list of short-lived meme coin trading spikes.
Investors who prefer steadier exposure to crypto sometimes skip the meme coin churn altogether. A buy-and-hold approach through something like Bitcoin ETFs in a TFSA or RRSP looks nothing like chasing a 100-second trade, and that’s exactly the point for people who want growth without the whiplash.
For now, ANSEM and its peers have Solana buzzing again. Whether that buzz turns into anything lasting is worth watching over the next few weeks.
