Solana Meme Market Gets ‘Drained,’ Is Ethereum Set for a Turning Point?

动区动趋 BlockTempo

2025-02-18 16:45

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Original Article Title: "Ethereum Ready to Explode? Analyst: ETH/BTC Has Bottomed Out, Solana Faces Meme Culture Collapse"

Original Article Author: DaFi Weave, BlockTempo

After the Trump team released $TRUMP, the wives of Trump, $MELANIA, and the Central African president, $CAR, were also launched one after another. The most controversial one now is the $LIBRA of the Argentine president, which seems to have become the fuse for the meme coin hype collapse.

As more and more meme coins become tools for insider trading and pump and dumps, the scandals in the meme coin market continue to escalate, with price trends generally showing a pump and dump pattern, and the market hype enthusiasm beginning to cool down. This trend is also reflected in the price of meme coin hub Solana (SOL).

SOL Drops to $174

According to Binance spot data, SOL dropped from $186.94 last night to a low of $174.63, with a slight recovery to $178.05 at the time of writing, a 4.4% drop in the past 24 hours, making it the worst-performing token among the top 30 by market capitalization.

Trader Tyler tweeted, "The market is unleashing its wrath on Solana." He cited data from Binance's perpetual contracts to point out that the short-to-long ratio has risen to 4:1, reflecting a significantly bearish sentiment in the Solana market.

Who Has Harvested the Solana Meme Coin Market?

The Solana meme coin market has been "exploited" by various institutions, trading bots, and insiders, harvesting billions of dollars. According to DeFiLlama founder 0xngmi's statistics, the total earnings obtained by different participants from the Solana meme coin market are as follows:

Trading bots and applications: $1.09 billion Pump.fun platform: $492 million MEV (Maximal Extractable Value): $15-20 billion Trump-related insiders: $5-10 billion Other insiders: Unknown AMMs (Automated Market Makers): $0-20 billion

He stated that the total is above $3.6 to $6.6 billion. This also reflects the high speculative nature of the meme coin market, with many profits not enjoyed by ordinary investors but rather captured by high-frequency traders, arbitrageurs, and insiders.

Analyst: ETH/BTC May Have Bottomed Out

As Solana took a hit due to meme coins, the market seems to be shifting its focus to Ethereum. Zhu Su, founder of Three Arrows Capital (3AC), tweeted yesterday suggesting that it's time to go all-in on Ethereum.

Aran Hawker, CEO of trading automation platform CoinPanel, told CoinDesk that Ethereum's recent price increase is not a true overperformance but rather a price regression to a proper level. He further stated that some traders may be moving funds back from SOL to ETH, but the market trend and structure have not significantly changed. If this uptrend faces a major market shift, it could be swiftly wiped out.

However, Joel Kruger, market strategist at LMAX Group, holds a more optimistic view, suggesting that this could be a signal of the end of Ethereum's multi-year devaluation trend against Bitcoin. He mentioned that the ETH to BTC ratio has been declining since 2021 but might be currently forming a bottom. We should closely watch the monthly high of the ETH/BTC pair, as a successful breakout would strengthen the potential trend reversal.

At the time of writing, the ETH/BTC ratio is currently at 0.0282, down 1.78% in the last 24 hours, sitting at a low not seen since the end of 2020.

Furthermore, according to CoinGlass data, market interest in ETH significantly increased yesterday (17), with futures open interest growing by 12% in 24 hours to around $2.6 billion, mainly from Binance and Gate.io. In contrast, BTC futures open interest only increased by 1%, showing a flow of funds towards ETH.

However, Ethereum has retraced from yesterday's $2849.7 to $2703.91, a cumulative drop of over 5%. The future price action of Ethereum still requires close monitoring.