🎶 Wake Me Up When September Ends 🎶

…is what every degen and their crypto-curious uncle are belting right now.

September is a typically rough month for the traditional market, and that holds true for crypto, too. Historically, this month is neutral to down right bad for the crypto markets, as all the excitement generally picks up heading into the end of the year — and six days in, 2024 seems to be no exception.

Solana’s on-chain volume has dropped dramatically, leading some to wonder whether winter has come for #memeseason. Indeed, many of the get rich quick meme coins that popped off in the first half of the year have since fizzled out.

Really only one winner emerged from the meme cesspool: Pump.Fun. The platform that made it easier for anyone to release a meme coin has sucked some $100 million in liquidity out of the crypto markets, in the form of revenue from tokens launched on its platform. It’s basically the 2024est version of selling pickaxes to gold miners — selling smelling salts to the degenerates.

You heard it here first: Meme coins are S-tier smelling salts.

But a sleepy September doesn’t necessarily mean I expect to wake up in a month to a full-blown crypto winter. For every read flag, there’s a green one, indicating that this dumpy, post-halving consolidation period could possibly soon become the roaring bull market of years past.

An easy one to point to is the post-Breakpoint boost. Solana Breakpoint, the annual keystone conference for the ecosystem — at which new updates, projects, and partnerships are often revealed — is scheduled for September 20-21. This event has historically led to an average value increase of 62% for $SOL, and other tokens in the ecosystem.

(Even us dyed-in-the-wool $mother’s boys may get some crumbs. The conference will host the $mother of all talks, a debate between Iggy Azalea and Erica Wall on the merits of celebrity engagement in web3.)

Outside of Solana, web3’s largest annual conference, Token2049, is also looming. It will be held in Singapore in the days leading up to Breakpoint.

These major events scheduled for the end of September could kickstart the hype heading into the end of the year — which, it’s worth repeating, is when said hype often starts snowballing anyway. And personally, I predict a lot of the hype will be concentrated on the Solana ecosystem, given the timing. Just look at what Helium and DePIN did for the Solana ecosystem at last fall’s event. 

Events and conferences aren’t the only green flags that move prices. I asked ChatGPT for a comprehensive abstract list. Like any good degen, it responded exclusively in buzzwords: Regulatory Clarity, Supply Shocks, and a personal favorite of ours, Institutional Adoption & Interest.

(It also delivered a few lol’s, like Macroeconomic Headwinds Painting Crypto as A Safe Haven — because if there’s one phrase that comes to mind when I think of crypto, it’s “Safe Haven”. Ironically, it then nailed the crypto market’s subjective, unpredictable nature in one succinct suggestion: More Whales.)

Point is, yeah, Meme Coin Summer might be over. But, to quote another Green Day classic, good riddance. A few lucky $dogwifhat investors (and the Pump.Fun C-Suite) may have had the time of their lives. But for the bulk of us, #memeseason was just an expensive distraction at best. And with several key events on the horizon — where announcements tend to lean more toward quality over quantity — Utility Autumn might be just beginning.

—El Prof