The Solana Trenches: Where VCs Meet Degens
How venture capital math found its way into 24/7 shitcoin warfare
This past year, I spent way too many nights diving into Solana’s wild west of token launches. What started as casual curiosity turned into a complete rabbit hole about how traditional VC logic has migrated into the most chaotic corner of crypto. The parallels are both fascinating and terrifying.
A venture capitalist and a degen trader walk into a bar. The VC says, “I’m comfortable being wrong 90% of the time.” The degen replies, “Only 90%? Amateur.” The wild part is they both play the exact same game.
Traditional VC has always been about power law distributions. You throw money at 100 startups, watch 80 of them die slow deaths, see 19 barely break even, and pray that one becomes the next Google. It feels a bit romantic but actually it’s just math. Specifically, it’s the math of fat tailed distributions where one outlier can fund your entire portfolio’s failures. Now fast forward to Solana’s pump.fun era. Same math, different substrate. Instead of betting on companies, you’re betting on anything that is attention worthy they call these memes or cultural moments and instead of waiting years for exits, you’re watching tokens either moon or crater within hours. In the past these were captions or specific funny moments that spread worldwide but now any good or bad news can be a pumpfun token as long as it attract few eyes.
I’ve been tracking this phenomenon for months, and the pattern is unmistakable. The successful “trenchers” (what they call the 24/7 token hunters) aren’t the ones picking winners on trending page they’re the ones who’ve figured out how to survive the losers. This whole model didn’t come from nowhere. It came from people trying to speed up the same games VCs have been playing for decades. Before, investors needed meetings, legal paperwork, and trust. Now none of that matters. These degen systems removed the middle steps. The bonding curve is the seed round. The first tweet is the pitch. Getting attention is the product. And all of it happens instantly. You don’t wait for the company to grow or the tech to develop.
The moment people see something funny or weird or timely, the token launches. That’s why this whole thing works. It cuts out everything slow And the reason it exploded on Solana and not somewhere else is because of block speed and cost. You can make and nuke 10 tokens in one day with almost no gas fee. That’s the only reason this kind of volume is even possible. On Ethereum you’d burn thousands just testing. Here, you just fire. And yeah, it’s chaotic. But when you break it down, this isn’t much different from how seed investing looked in the 90s. Back then it was “fund ten startups, one might be Amazon.” Now it’s “buy 100 tokens, one might be WEN.” Same logic. Just lower friction. People who don’t get it think it’s random. But it’s not random.
Most of these trenchers aren’t even trying to understand the meme they just want to see if it spreads. If it spreads, they ride it. If not, they exit. That’s also why most of these tokens have zero roadmap. Nobody cares. If the attention sticks, a roadmap gets made after. If not, the token is already dead in 3 hours anyway. These things live and die based on how fast they reach the next group of people. It’s not about holding. It’s about flow. And this flow is super visible. If you watch the trending page long enough, you can see which tokens have real people behind them and which are botted or bundled. If you see only one wallet doing all the buying, it’s fake. If you see a wide spread of wallets and rising holder count, it’s real enough to watch. Same with Raydium or now Pumpswap migrations. If a token doesn’t make it to Raydium, nobody cares. But if it does, and it still holds volume after the hype, that’s where people start betting bigger. That’s the equivalent of Series A. Not because the team is good. Just because the market said “ok this one might live longer than 5 hours.” Everything comes down to how long attention can be stretched. People mostly betting on if a meme can last two cycles instead of one. The moment people stop caring, the token is over. That’s why trenchers are addicted to newsfeeds. You miss one post from the right account, and you’re late so the system rewards people who stay plugged in 24/7. Same like early VCs getting into Uber in 2009 before anyone cared. But instead of waiting 5 years, you wait 5 minutes and decide if it’s worth clicking. The funny thins is also why nobody gets angry about losses. Everyone knows 99% will go to zero and people don’t complain like in a way this market braincoded people so much a straightforward scam become an acceptable standard. They just move on to the next one. That’s why this whole memecoin space is about repetition. You don’t win by being right once. You win by trying 300 times and hitting one thing that makes up for the rest. Same as VC math. But without the PR teams pretending everything is innovation. Here the scoreboard is public. You either printed or you didn’t.
The repetition factor scales this: run 50 trades a day at $10 each, and over 30 days, that’s 1,500 attempts. With a 0.7% hit rate on 50x runners, you net enough to cover the 93% zeros and 6% doubles. Adjust for Solana’s fees under $0.01 per tx, and the edge sharpens versus VC’s 2/20 carry model, where one unicorn pays for 99 duds but takes years to realize. Spotting sustainability involves cross checking media velocity: use tools like LunarCrush to see if a token’s social mentions spike daily, not just hourly. A political token from a debate clip might rebound three days later on follow-up polls, giving multiple cycles, much like how Uber’s 2009 seed bet paid off through regulatory battles stretching years. If mentions flatline, trenchers bail, as the flow stops.
Over months, patterns emerge where 70% of migrants that hold 24-hour volume above $50k have events with multi-platform legs, like a celeb endorsement crossing from X to Instagram. That endurance turns a quick flip into a portfolio anchor, echoing how Sequoia’s early Google stake funded decades of bets. The awake at the right time element boils down to timezone arbitrage too: Asian trenchers catch US evening launches fresh, gaining 10-minute edges that compound in a 24-hour market. The system’s low barrier lets anyone run the VC playbook at warp speed. Probabilistic grinding drives it all.
Take it further up the chain, and you see how these shitcoins feed into the big leagues through OTC style backroom deals that echo Wall Street’s shadiest acquisitions. In traditional VC, once a startup hits a certain traction, big caps swoop in with over-the-counter trades private swaps of shares at a premium, away from public exchanges to avoid tanking the price. Facebook quietly bought Instagram in 2012 for $1 billion, not through a noisy auction but a hushed negotiation where Mark Zuckerberg wired the cash and integrated the team overnight, absorbing the user base without a single tweet. On Solana’s ecosystem: a promising shitcoin that survives the pump.fun gauntlet and migrates to Raydium suddenly catches the eye of a blue chip project like Jito or Jupiter, sitting at multi-billion market caps. These big players don’t announce it on Discord, they hit up the token’s deployer or lead trenchers via Telegram DMs for an OTC buyout. It’s a straight cash-for-tokens swap, often 20-50% below market, where the big cap quietly accumulates 30-50% of the supply off chain, then announces a “strategic partnership” that sends the price parabolic. I’ve watched this play out with tokens like a niche DeFi meme that got folded into a lending protocol last summer started as a $50k rug risk on pump.fun, hit $2M cap on organic hype from a Reddit thread, then vanished into an OTC deal with a $500M aggregator. The acquirer dumps liquidity into their own pools, rebrands the meme as a governance token, and the original holders who flipped early walk away with 10x bags while the big cap’s community swells by thousands overnight.
After months of observation, I’ve noticed three signals that consistently show up before a token takes off:
When a token successfully migrates from pump.fun to Raydium, it’s a proof that enough people cared to push it past the bonding curve threshold as long as its not bundled (price action and many wallets controlled by one entity) so it needs to be organic and enough time has to pass in order for that token/attention worthy event to spread in the social media.
The number of unique holders should keep climbing even after the initial hype wave. Sustained growth means the story is spreading beyond the first wave of speculators.
The event or reason of that token existence needs to be sustainable It needs to be relevant tomorrow again or even larger. If not, these trenchers don’t even spend their time.
So it’s all about reading the media and the people. When all three signals align? I don’t know maybe it’s how some people win but the one thing I am sure is it’s just whoever’s awake at the right minute and acting without any logical intensions. This is not financial advice. I’m just a guy who spends too much time watching numbers go up and down. Do your own research, manage your risk, and never bet more than you can afford to lose.
-Mert