Crypto market no longer able to separate memecoins from Solana

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Kanye West. J.K. Rowling. Woody Allen. Some find it nearly impossible to separate art from artist.

Crypto markets are struggling with something similar about Solana. While there are all sorts of use cases for the chain that don’t have anything to do with highly manipulated memecoins, SOL is still getting punished for the LIBRA debacle — which all happened on Solana.

Since LIBRA insiders pumped and dumped the coin on Friday evening (supposedly to outsnipe the snipers waiting to capitalize first), SOL has tanked by as much as 18%.

It’s rebounded slightly since but the damage is clear, especially considering BTC and ETH are mostly even over the same period. SOL now has a $83.4 billion market cap, just over half that of XRP.

Meteora is tied to both Jupiter — though it’s said that the two have been positioned independently over the past year — and LIBRA. JUP, the native token for Solana DEX aggregator Jupiter, has also shed as much as 24%.

The chart above plots price action for six coins throughout the LIBRA launch starting almost two days earlier: TRUMP (orange), MELANIA (yellow), ETH (green), SOL (purple) and JUP (pink).

LIBRA’s market cap is otherwise shown by the blue area in the front.

What’s peculiar is that TRUMP, JUP and MELANIA rallied hard leading up to LIBRA’s sudden appearance, with the former reaching as high as 54% just four hours before LIBRA launched, and JUP as much as 17%.

Those trajectories changed one or two hours before LIBRA hit the chain and have been trending downward ever since the scandal broke out.

Jupiter, in a statement on X, described plans to launch LIBRA as an “open secret in memecoin circles.” The team says it has conducted an internal investigation and found no evidence of insider trading.

We’ll probably never know if the pre-LIBRA pumps were coincidences. But it’s obvious that the market finds it all convenient enough to bundle them all together under one roof — the Solana memecoin complex, as Galaxy’s Thorn put it — and it’s indeed valued much lower than before, at least over the short term.

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Supply Shock: Tracking Bitcoin’s rise from internet plaything worth less than a penny to global phenomenon disrupting money as we know it.

Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters:

Blockworks Daily: The newsletter that helps thousands of investors understand crypto and the markets, by Byron Gilliam.
Empire: Start your morning with the top news and analysis to inform your day in crypto.
Forward Guidance: Reporting and analysis on the growing intersection of crypto and macroeconomics, policy and finance.
0xResearch: Alpha directly in your inbox. Market highlights, data, degen trade ideas, governance updates, token performance and more.
Lightspeed: Built for Solana investors, developers and community members. The latest from one of crypto’s hottest networks.
The Drop: For crypto collectors and traders, covering apps, games, memes and more.
Supply Shock: Tracking Bitcoin’s rise from internet plaything worth less than a penny to global phenomenon disrupting money as we know it.