AI bots turbocharge Solana trading metrics

This is a segment from the Lightspeed newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe.

For the past six months, Solana’s onchain volume has ebbed and flowed with the momentum of memecoins. In recent days, that general trend seems to have been turbocharged.

Solana’s onchain metrics are at levels unreached, even in the peak of this summer’s memecoin mania. The theme of this memecoin upswing appears to be AI bots, which have captured trader mindshare and given memecoins something they have so far seemed to lack — a semblance of meaning.

Solana’s real economic value (REV), a measure of the blockchain’s income, has set new highs for four consecutive days, ginning up a record $36 million last week. This week will likely break that record again — Solana’s REV was $11 million on Thursday alone. 

Last week, nearly 78% of Solana DEX volume pertained to memecoins, per Blockworks Research, which marks an all-time high for memecoin dominance.

Solana’s price has also hit an all-time high relative to its rival, ether: For the first time ever, SOL hit 7% of ETH’s price. This frothiness has been a couple weeks in the making, but it seemed to really take off with the bizarre saga of Goatseus Maximum — a memecoin endorsed by an absurdist AI bot called truth_terminal. 

The story was unhinged enough to go viral. The token now has a market capitalization of over $730 million, while the chat bot’s public wallet now holds more than $2.7 million in crypto, largely driven by airdrops of other memecoins.

GOAT spawned a cottage industry of would-be follow-ups. On Thursday evening, each of the top eight trending tokens on the trading data site DEX Screener were AI-related, with many claiming to also be linked to some sort of “AI agent.”

For much of this year, memecoins have drawn inspiration from unserious things like funny pictures of animals or public figures. In this new memecoin market phase, traders are making it seem like they think something more serious is going on. 

One viral X thread and blog post author said truth_terminal represents “the birth of an entirely new category of coins/money,” and the saga is “unlocking portions of my brain I didn’t know I possessed.”

“It’s basically a new species of digital organism,” Miko Matsumura from gumi Cryptos Capital told me in a text.

Still, if all this AI agent business holds any real meaning, that significance remains elusive. To summarize multiple conversations I’ve had this week, “the truth_terminal story feels really important, but I can’t quite articulate my take on it.” And as Helius CEO Mert Mumtaz pointed out, “AI agents” may just be a sleight of hand rebranding of chat bots.

Memecoins now purport to be about something real though, and just having that pretense could be what’s responsible for the meme market pushing Solana metrics to all-time highs. 

“Financial nihilism is inherently self-limiting,” the popular anonymous account Sisyphus wrote of GOAT on X.

“Memecoins are a meaningless casino” isn’t a great sales pitch. “We’ve discovered a new frontier in AI” — whether that’s true or not — could be.

Start your day with top crypto insights from David Canellis and Katherine Ross. Subscribe to the Empire newsletter.

Explore the growing intersection between crypto, macroeconomics, policy and finance with Ben Strack, Casey Wagner and Felix Jauvin. Subscribe to the Forward Guidance newsletter.

Get alpha directly in your inbox with the 0xResearch newsletter — market highlights, charts, degen trade ideas, governance updates, and more.

The Lightspeed newsletter is all things Solana, in your inbox, every day. Subscribe to daily Solana news from Jack Kubinec and Jeff Albus.