Author: Sam Schubert, 0xResearch
Compiled by DeepChain TechFlow
Shenchao Overview: This is a classic experiment on how attention becomes liquidity. Meme coin traders were funneled into a tokenized stock pool, with stock tokens serving as the pricing asset, causing trading volume to multiply exponentially—but less than 2% of participants truly converted into stock investors. For industry practitioners, the core question is: How long can this synthetic demand last, and will tokenized stocks become mere附属 currencies of memes rather than independent assets?
Meme trading surges with stocks as the underlying asset
StonkFun has turned tokenized stocks into a type of meme coin on Solana. From September 1 to October 11, meme coins priced in tokenized stocks accounted for 31.5% of Solana’s tokenized stock DEX trading volume, totaling $1.76 billion out of the $5.58 billion we tracked. We estimate that approximately four-fifths of this volume was driven by StonkFun’s tokens.
Pump.fun Surpasses the SpaceX Case
Among these trading pairs, Pump has surpassed StonkFun. It launched its custom trading pair on September 9 and captured about a quarter of trading volume in its first week. By the week of October 11, this share rose to 58%, accounting for $125 million out of $216 million, with daily trading volume increasing from approximately $10 million to $18 million, while StonkFun’s volume dropped from around $42 million to $13 million.
A recent notable example is SpaceX. Custom trading pairs enabled meme coins to trade against SPCX (Sunrise’s tokenized SpaceX), with Pump’s share of SPCX trading volume rising weekly from approximately 5% to around 12%, with SPCX accounting for over 80% of the increase. On October 10, meme/SPCX liquidity pools on Pump traded approximately $20 million, representing about 38% of SPCX’s total DEX trading volume, with roughly half coming from two newly launched Super Intelligent Beauty tokens.
These trading pairs also drove volume to other DEXs. On October 10, over $18 million in SPCX trades on other platforms shared the same transaction as a Pump Meme swap, but this reflected routing paths more than new demand for SpaceX. StonkFun’s SpaceX Meme traded against another token on Raydium, with daily volume consistently ranging between $2 million and $3 million.
Every Meme trade is counted as tokenized stock trading volume, since tokenized stocks are its quoted asset, and buyers using SOL or stablecoins must go through these liquidity pools to purchase Meme coins.
Reward token distribution: Low retention rate and minimal genuine purchases
Reward tokens are also drawing meme traders toward stock tokens. From August 3 to October 11, reward tokens distributed approximately $31 million in stock tokens to over 360,000 wallets, about four-fifths of which had no prior purchase history. As shown below, this trend caused the number of tokenized stock holders on Solana to triple in September.
Most people who received stock rewards did not hold onto these tokens. Of the 289,000 wallets that never purchased stock tokens, 82% sold them or transferred them elsewhere. Among the 18% of wallets that chose to hold, most retained only very small amounts.
A very small number later bought stocks directly. About one-sixth of people did purchase stock tokens afterward, but only to buy meme coins pegged to the stock, not the stock itself. Only about 2% of these wallets ultimately bought tokenized stocks specifically to hold the underlying stock.
In addition, StonkFun and Pump.fun have turned stock tokens into meme coins, boosting trading volume for tokenized stocks and distributing small amounts of stock to hundreds of thousands of wallets. However, the audience remains primarily meme traders rather than newly涌入的 stock investors.
The synergistic cycle between hotspots and liquidity
On the positive side, these products connect two key trading domains on Solana. When a company becomes a real-world sensation, memes about it quickly follow—and those memes can now be traded against its tokenized stock. Every meme trade passes through the stock token, meaning the popularity of memes drives additional trading volume and liquidity to the tokenized stock, while the reward tokens give holders a legitimate asset. This synergistic cycle makes Solana a stronger ecosystem for both, thanks to its composable trading environment.
The tokenized SpaceX (SPCX) by Sunrise has累计 traded $1.56 billion on Solana DEXs, led by Zerofi, while the SpaceX Meme on Pump has contributed approximately $56 million since its custom trading pair launched on September 9.
