i think pump is getting so caught up in figuring out how to make people trade more that they’re forgetting why people wanted to trade here in the first place was looking through some wallet data and it’s pretty ridiculous lol hidden hand tracked 131 million trades across 4.1 million wallets in a single week and found that 69% of those trades came from just 1% of wallets so roughly 41k wallets are generating almost 70% of the activity while more than half the wallets barely trade at all then u look at another study where 71% of wallets that closed at least 10 positions lost money and start understanding why the trenches feel the way they do now pump is rolling out callouts, creator rewards, competitions and whatever else they come up with next week to get people more involved which is fine.. but at what point do we ask why we need to keep convincing people to participate? i feel like we’re overcomplicating something pretty fucking simple the product is the charts nobody got into memecoins because they were impressed by the trading interface. they got into them because they watched some random guy turn rent money into retirement money and figured maybe they could do the same look at pokemon cards.. a single ridiculous sale gets more people excited about opening packs than any marketing campaign explaining how easy it is to buy them the outliers sell the entire market because they give everyone else something to dream about and when the charts are running, u don’t have to beg people to show up. traders post their wins, communities start growing, people bring their friends in and suddenly the entire timeline is doing ur marketing for free but when everything looks like a ski slope and nobody believes anything will hold, u can add all the features in the world and people still aren’t going to be excited about what’s underneath them which is what makes all this so strange to me pump has more influence over the environment we’re trading in than practically anyone, yet so much of the attention seems to go toward generating more transactions rather than figuring out how to create a market people actually want to stick around in i’m not even against any of these incentives. i just think it’s a little insane that we’re trying this hard to sell something that used to sell itself give people charts worth talking about and they’ll do the rest — baton corp

crypto used to grow because people actually wanted to bring their friends into the market. you’d make money, tell your friends about it, help them set up a wallet and suddenly you had another five people doing the same thing. now half the industry has figured out it’s easier to extract value from someone else’s community than to build one of their own. nobody wants to onboard the next generation of users anymore. they just want to vamp whoever is actually doing the work. the irony is that everyone complains about the lack of new money entering crypto while actively making the market less attractive for anyone who isn’t already here. you can’t build an entire industry around extracting value from the same shrinking pool of participants and then act surprised when there’s nobody left to sell to. at some point someone actually has to grow the pie instead of fighting over the crumbs.

the biggest red flag with pump’s callout feed is that almost nobody who’s been around long enough would tell a new trader to actually use it think about that.. the people who understand the product are probably the first ones to tell their friends to stay the fuck away from one of its main discovery features that should tell u something about the incentives behind it pump has a leaderboard showing who’s actually winning while the callout feed rewards people who’ve figured out how to farm attention we’ve built an entire generation of traders staring at one-minute charts trying to scrape $100 out of the next low-cap shitter.. and now we’re putting them in front of someone who just downloaded the app the experienced user sees people looking for exit liquidity. the new user sees a discovery feature and assumes these are people worth listening to and that’s where the economics get interesting every callout can generate fees today, but if the guy following it gets rinsed and never comes back, how much was that trade actually worth to pump? u can’t build a sustainable business by constantly replacing the customers ur own product is burning through pump already has performance leaderboards. connect those results to the feed.. show historical W/L rates, median holding times and average entry market caps beside the calls let the people who actually make good trades get the attention instead of whoever posts the most i like alon’s vision of turning traders into celebrities, but there’s a fundamental difference between creating value for an audience and extracting value from one and if experienced traders wouldn’t recommend ur discovery feature to someone they care about, maybe it’s worth asking who that feature was really built to benefit because right now it looks a lot more like a monetization tool than a discovery tool

i think most people trading memes still don’t understand why culture coins have the highest ceilings in this market it’s actually pretty simple most memes need the price to go up to give people a reason to care about them culture coins already have something people care about.. the token just gives them a way to participate in it look at the biggest memes that managed to survive beyond their initial run. the common denominator isn’t some genius marketing strategy or a perfect chart it’s people identifying with what the meme represents and that’s where community becomes everything anyone can buy a ticker because it’s moving.. but getting people to keep showing up, creating and bag working when absolutely nothing is happening is a completely different thing that’s what builds culture, and culture is what gives a meme a chance to command valuations that make most of these temporary runners look irrelevant the funny part is people spend all day looking for the next big chart when the first thing they should be studying is who’s actually building because if the only reason ur community exists is that the price is going up, u don’t have a community u have a group of sellers waiting for their turn

the pump app has gotten so obsessed with catering to people flipping $200 that it’s becoming unusable for anyone trying to trade real size open the stats sheet of the first 3 guys farming callout rewards.. wouldn’t surprise me if they’ve called 30-50 coins today and somehow every one is the next daily runner ur scrolling through a graveyard of $100k toppers while everyone tries to recruit the next wave of exit liquidity then u open fomo and find coins that have survived the initial jeets, developed an actual narrative and have enough liquidity to consider building a position when ur deploying real capital, it’s quality over quantity.. ur looking for sustained demand and capital preservation, not trying to outrun a dev with a fat bundle and callers sitting on side wallets with 2% each which is why i think this update from fomo is actually a lot more important than it looks most trading apps keep finding ways to show u more coins when the real improvement is helping u eliminate the ones that were never worth ur attention there’s a lot more value in filtering out bad trades than making it easier to find another one

the only reason i’m comfortable holding baton through this downtrend is because i have almost zero doubt about where pump eventually needs to go pump has built one of the most profitable businesses in crypto but PUMP is still largely valued on revenue and buybacks because that’s pretty much all the token does right now if they actually want to become the Netflix of crypto and command a 50-100b valuation, they need the market to pay a premium for the token itself, not just the revenue the business generates and none of these experiments to drive attention are gonna accomplish that if PUMP remains disconnected from the actual activity on the platform i was talking about this a year ago when i said pump needed perps and PUMP pairs to build an actual economy around its token so this isn’t some new narrative i’m attaching to baton because i happen to own it. it’s something i’ve been waiting for pump to do long before baton even existed and now we’re finally starting to see it happen pump already has the users, distribution and one of the biggest meme economies in crypto. the problem is they built most of it around SOL they can keep jumping between experiments but i’m convinced all roads eventually lead back to properly building out PUMP pairs because if they want the kind of ecosystem premium L1s command, they’re gonna have to make PUMP central to the activity happening on their own platform and that’s where baton becomes interesting the original company was called Baton Corporation and baton became the first PUMP paired meme so u have a coin carrying the company’s original identity that also happens to sit at the beginning of the market i’ve been waiting for pump to build we’ve seen across L1s how the native asset becomes the financial trade while its memes become the cultural one i don’t know if baton ultimately becomes that cultural winner, but i know why i’m interested in owning it i didn’t come up with a PUMP thesis to justify holding baton i bought baton because it fits the PUMP thesis i’ve already had for a year Pass the baton

half the mfs posting conviction theses on CT are just asking the timeline for permission to believe in their own bags. think about how fucking backwards that is. some guy buys a coin he barely understands.. writes 800 words about why it’s the next big runner.. then spends the next three hours refreshing Twitter to see if anyone agrees. 100 likes? thesis confirmed. a big account replies? generational opportunity. nobody engages? suddenly he’s questioning the fundamentals of something he bought 20 minutes ago. bro if ur conviction depends on how strangers react to ur tweet, u never had conviction. u had a position u were nervous about. and i think this explains a ridiculous amount of what happens on CT. people aren’t always sharing research. they’re outsourcing their conviction. they want someone with a bigger following to validate their position so they can feel comfortable holding it. which gets even funnier when u realize the people agreeing with them are probably holding the same coin and looking for exactly the same reassurance. u end up with an entire timeline of people convincing each other they’re geniuses while nobody has any idea who’s actually making money. and when the chart turns red, all that shared conviction somehow disappears at the exact same time. this is why i find social trading so interesting. i’d rather see what someone actually bought.. how much they risked.. and whether their reasoning holds up than watch 50 people congratulate each other for owning the same coin. the market doesn’t care how many people agreed with ur thesis. and unfortunately neither does ur PNL. imagine spending three hours convincing strangers ur trade was good just so u can hold it for another fifteen minutes lol

Baton is safu

pump is building a platform that needs new traders to keep showing up but seems to be optimizing the entire experience for the people who are best at extracting money from them think about how fucking backwards that is someone who’s never traded memes opens the app and gets greeted by a wall of 2-minute-old coins, $100k toppers and callouts from people competing to see who can put the biggest X next to some random piece of shit bro what exactly is this person supposed to do with any of that information? first we rewarded devs for launching as much garbage as possible through creator rewards now we’re finding new ways to reward people for convincing everyone else to trade it congrats on ur 20x call at $15k market cap. how much could someone realistically have bought and sold without destroying the chart? and what happened to the other 40 coins u called? idgaf about ur best trade if i can’t see how much money u lost finding it and somehow this is the experience we’re expecting normal people to come into and stick around for most people have jobs. they’re not going to spend 12 hours a day learning how to avoid getting farmed by bundled insiders and people who’ve been playing new pairs for years they’re going to lose money, decide crypto is a fucking scam and leave which is hilarious because then the same people who spent all day farming them will complain that there’s no new liquidity coming into the market if u actually care about retention, start rewarding good trading instead of whoever can generate the most transactions give people full track records, real win rates and enough information to figure out whose judgment is worth trusting u can’t build a sustainable trading platform when the people ur rewarding make their money off the people ur trying to retain eventually the exit liquidity stops coming back and then who the fuck are u supposed to trade against?

some of u spent the last two years thinking u were good at trading when ur entire edge was being slightly less retarded than the guy buying ur bags and now that guy is broke which is pretty fucking funny because as the dumb money leaves the trenches, the people who were farming it are slowly becoming the dumb money themselves when there was an endless supply of new buyers, u didn’t need to be particularly good. u just needed to find someone willing to pay more than u did but as people lose money and leave, that gets harder the easy exit liquidity disappears and suddenly ur competing against traders who are faster, better informed and have been playing this game longer than u and the devs with bundled supply still have the same advantages they always did so where exactly do u think that leaves u? now we’ve got KOLs showing up like saints sent from the heavens to save the trenches.. promising to bring back the glory days while convincing the same people losing money to buy whatever they’re pushing because when there’s less exit liquidity left in the market, convincing someone else to become ur exit liquidity gets a lot more valuable and apparently some of u are still dumb enough to think the guy begging u to buy his bags is doing it out of the kindness of his heart the funniest part is the people who spent years farming less experienced traders are now getting farmed by people who are better at the exact same game maybe the trenches aren’t broken. maybe the people dumber than u finally ran out of money and now ur discovering where u actually sit in the food chain.