Solana-backed meme coins STONK and ZCAT surpass $100 million market cap

Original | Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)

Author | Golem (@web3_golem)

This weekend, two new million-dollar memecoins emerged on-chain, both on Solana.

On the morning of September 6, the Solana-based coin-pair meme coin STONK experienced a sharp surge, rising over 110% in a short time, with its market cap surpassing $100 million to become the first coin-pair meme coin on Solana to reach that milestone. As of publication, STONK’s market cap remains stable around $100 million. Meanwhile, the meme coin ZCAT also reached a $100 million market cap at noon and has since retraced to around $80 million.

This phenomenon also signifies that Solana has officially sounded the call to counter the ongoing Meme bull market on Robinhood Chain and BSC.

StonkFun is a meme launchpad on Solana featuring stock-token pairings, similar to the popular Long platform on Robinhood Chain. This article does not elaborate further on the token issuance mechanism; interested readers may refer to Odaily’s previous article (Related Reading: Robinhood Chain Sees Another $100M Market Cap Gold Dog, Stock-Token Meme Backs RWA). STONK is the official token of StonkFun, paired with the stock token of SPY on Solana.

Compared to the mature meme launch platform on Robinhood, StonkFun is still in its early stages—the platform launched on August 3 and only officially integrated with Raydium LaunchLab on September 6 to address token sniper issues. As of the time of writing, StonkFun has launched over 8,220 meme tokens, only two of which have surpassed a $10 million market cap: the platform’s native token STONK and the meme token ZCAT, paired with the privacy coin ZEC, whose highest market cap reached $100 million.

StonkFun

Clearly, StonkFun is committed to the "leading coin strategy," supporting and empowering STONK and ZCAT to attract Meme investors through wealth effects, pursuing dual tracks of coin-stock paired Meme and native Meme markets. According to official announcements, StonkFun has repurchased over $1 million worth of STONK and airdropped over $1 million worth of ZEC to ZCAT holders. As of September 6, StonkFun has airdropped over $7.5 million in token rewards to ecosystem token holders.

According to DefiLlama data, StonkFun generated $110,000 in fees over the past 24 hours and only $1.23 million in fees over the past 30 days—far less than Pons’ daily revenue. Clearly, STONK’s surge is not due to StonkFun’s exceptional performance, but rather due to deliberate support from Solana’s official team combined with widespread market FOMO.

On September 4, StonkFun posted on X about support for stock tokens, receiving a triple engagement—like, comment, and retweet—from Raydium, the official Solana account, and Solana co-founder Toly. In the Meme community, players are highly sensitive to any move by “big names”; Solana’s official endorsement was seen as clear validation and support for StonkFun, naturally boosting its value.

Solana official and Toly interact with StonkFun

Moreover, the community is betting on continued interaction or actual support from Solana’s official team or Toly with StonkFun. In the community’s interpretation, during this Meme rally, some are playing Robinhood Chain, others are playing BSC, but seemingly no one is playing Solana. To avoid falling behind, Solana’s official team will surely promote Meme tokens within its ecosystem. Although Toly may avoid direct endorsement to mitigate legal risks, he will likely engage on social platforms to subtly stir market sentiment—this is the kind of nuanced, unspoken guidance only major figures can offer.

The community's speculation is not without merit; Solana has long been a popular chain for overseas Meme communities, largely thanks to Pump.fun. However, in this round of market movement dominated by coin-stock paired Meme tokens, Pump.fun has shifted its focus away from Meme token launches toward mobile applications and building a social trading platform. It has yet to introduce functionality for launching coin-stock paired Meme tokens, and on the Pump.fun homepage, the “Create Token” option is no longer prominently displayed—replaced instead by a feed of trading activity.

This has caused the Solana ecosystem to fall behind during this Meme cycle, with a large number of overseas Meme traders migrating to the Robinhood Chain ecosystem. Over the past 30 days, Solana’s transaction fees have totaled only $22 million, dropping it to the 18th position among blockchains. As a result, STONK’s rally carries an “ideological” dimension, similar to defense contractors during the Cold War, Baidu during the dot-com bubble, or ChangXin in the AI era—StonkFun is Solana’s favored project in the battle for Meme dominance.

Moreover, in this round of coin-stock pairing meme行情, Solana is indispensable, because the significance of coin-stock pairing memes to blockchain ecosystems lies in their ability to drive trading of stock tokens. While both involve trading, their implications are entirely different: rampant meme trading typically carries negative connotations such as speculation, fraud, and lack of real-world utility, whereas active trading of stock tokens signifies innovation, RWA, and the real-world relevance of crypto to traditional finance.

For Solana, which built its wealth on Meme trading, it desperately needs this market cycle to drive RWA adoption—so much so that Toly is eager to recruit Robinhood.

On September 5, Toly posted on X suggesting that Robinhood Chain's 10% revenue share payment to Arbitrum is not worthwhile, noting that these fees could cover approximately four times the transaction costs on Solana during the same period. He implied that if this revenue were used to subsidize user transactions, Robinhood Chain could offer users a completely gas-free experience, clearly expressing his preference for Robinhood Chain to adopt Solana's technology.

Steven Goldfeder, co-founder of Offchain Labs, quickly responded to Toly, stating that by choosing Arbitrum, Robinhood acts as a "landlord" rather than a "tenant"—under Arbitrum’s architecture, Robinhood can retain 90% of the gas fees; whereas if it chose Solana, Robinhood would earn no revenue from gas fees at all, let alone use that revenue to subsidize user transactions.

Robinhood has not yet responded to this debate; for now, Solana can only rely on itself to turn the tide in this round of Meme coin momentum.