The Memestock Money Loop

StonkFun turned tokenized stocks into a currency for memecoins on Solana. From September 1 to October 11, memecoins paired against tokenized stocks made up 31.5% of tokenized-equity DEX volume on Solana, $1.76B of the $5.58B tracked. We estimate StonkFun’s coins drove about four-fifths of that.

Pump has overtaken StonkFun in these pairs. It launched Custom Pairs on Sep 9 and took about a quarter of the volume in its first week. In the week to Oct 11 it jumped to 58%, $125M of $216M, as its volume rose from about $10M to $18M a day while StonkFun’s fell from about $42M to $13M. 

The clearest recent example is SpaceX. Custom Pairs let memecoins trade against SPCX, Sunrise’s tokenized SpaceX, and Pump’s share of trading in Sunrise-issued tokens rose from ~5% to ~12% week over week, with SPCX making up over 80% of the gain. Pump’s meme/SPCX pools traded ~$20M on Oct 10, about 38% of all SPCX DEX volume, with around half of that coming from two new Super Intelligent Beauty coin launches. 

These pairs also pull volume onto other DEXs. On Oct 10, over $18M of SPCX swaps elsewhere shared a transaction with a Pump meme swap, though that shows routing rather than new demand for SpaceX. StonkFun’s SpaceX memes, which trade against a separate token on Raydium, stayed flat at about $2M to $3M a day.

Every meme trade counts as tokenized equity volume because the stock token is the asset it is denominated in, and buyers coming from SOL or stablecoins must be routed through these pools to reach the memecoin. 

Reward tokens also put stock tokens in front of memecoin traders. Reward coins paid over 360k wallets ~$31M in stock tokens from August 3 to October 11, and about four in five had no record of buying one before. As the chart below shows, this theme saw tokenized stock holders on Solana triple in September.

Most of the people who got the stock rewards didn’t keep them. Of the 289k wallets that had never bought a stock token before, 82% sold it or sent it elsewhere. The 18% that held on were mostly left with small amounts. 

Very few went on to buy stocks directly. About one in six did buy a stock token later, but because it was a step to buying a memecoin priced in that stock, not to buy the stock itself. Only around 2 in 100 of these wallets went on to buy tokenized stocks for their own sake.

Moreover, StonkFun and Pump.fun made stock tokens the currency for memecoins, which lifted tokenized stock volume and spread small amounts of stock across hundreds of thousands of wallets. But the audience is still mostly memecoin traders rather than a new audience of stock investors. 

Still, the positive is that these products connect two key areas of trading on Solana. When a company is hot in real life, memes about it follow, and those memes can now trade against its tokenized stock. Every meme trade passes through the stock token, so memecoin hype brings extra trading and liquidity to tokenized stocks, and reward coins give holders a legitimate asset, a synergistic loop that makes Solana a stronger home for both, enabled by its composable trading environment. 

 — Sam