Solana memes are reawakening, with inflows to legacy projects and tokens, including USELESS and the WHITE WHALE.
Pump.fun benefited from the enthusiasm for meme tokens in early 2026, after closing a week of record trading volumes. The activity was based on PumpSwap trading, as the DEX established a leading position on Solana.
Pump.fun achieved a record weekly DEX volume for the first full week of 2026. For the past period, PumpSwap reached over $6.6B in trading, passing other Solana DEXs. The past week follows a long period of expanded DEX volumes.
The Pump.fun team has also tried to revive the meme market and boost the appeal of speculative trading.
The recent revival of several old memes, as well as new launches, shows the “trenches” have not given up, as long as the market shows signs of liquidity. Briefly, BonkFun also expanded its activity, but for now, Pump.fun remains the leader in farming revenues from both new launches and DEX trading.
In the new year, the trading and activity generate slightly lower fees of $13M daily, down from September’s peak $39M in fees. The fee mix depends on new minting activity, swaps, creator fees, and additional app usage fees.
The meme model has also shifted to even shorter-term lifecycles, to include content and creator tokens. The spikes in volume may also reflect whale or automated activity. Streaming and creator effects are also adding to the growing engagement, as well as users coming from the Padre app.
New token creation recovered to over 28,000 per day, with a rising trend in the past week. Pump.fun broke another milestone in early 2026, reaching over 15M token launches over its lifetime. However, only 208 tokens graduated to exchanges in the past day, and most trade at extremely low valuations.
Despite the success of Pump.fun and the recent recovery, the native PUMP token traded flat at $0.0021.
Legacy Solana meme tokens reawakened in the first week of 2026, with gains of up to 63% in the case of the White Whale.
Large-scale traders returned to selected memes, once again pumping FARTCOIN and USELESS. Other sources of growth were the TRUMP and MELANIA meme tokens, which rallied on the news of Donald Trump’s military campaign in Venezuela.
Memes are turning into short-term plays, though whales are also selecting projects like PIPPIN for repeat pumps. Memes on other networks are also reviving, including PEPE and FLOKI on Ethereum.
Meme tokens, unlike NFTs, have not been dismissed as dead projects. The tokens are closely watched for the inflow of new liquidity or whale-sized accumulation.
For now, only TRUMP retained a valuation above $1B,. The market, however, is still reevaluating the way to trade memes, whether through belief or short-term turnover.
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