Howdy!

Off-topic rant of the day: The RWA Summit in New York got me thinking about how much I dislike the term “real-world assets.” It would be fine if we were only talking about tokenized raw materials and stuff, but most RWAs are things like T-Bills, which don’t strike me as being very “real world.” But nobody consults little old me when they’re naming these things.

Today we’ve got AI agent memecoins, failed transactions and a Solana news roundup for you:

In AI agents, memecoins find their purpose

For the past six months, Solana’s onchain volume has ebbed and flowed with the momentum of memecoins. In recent days, that general trend seems to have been turbocharged.

Solana’s onchain metrics are at levels unreached, even in the peak of this summer’s memecoin mania. The theme of this memecoin upswing appears to be AI bots, which have captured trader mindshare and given memecoins something they have so far seemed to lack — a semblance of meaning.

Solana’s real economic value (REV), a measure of the blockchain’s income, has set new highs for four consecutive days, ginning up a record $36 million last week. This week will likely break that record again — Solana’s REV was $11 million on Thursday alone. 

Last week, nearly 78% of Solana DEX volume pertained to memecoins, per Blockworks Research, which marks an all-time high for memecoin dominance.

Solana’s price has also hit an all-time high relative to its rival, ether: For the first time ever, SOL hit 7% of ETH’s price. This frothiness has been a couple weeks in the making, but it seemed to really take off with the bizarre saga of Goatseus Maximum — a memecoin endorsed by an absurdist AI bot called truth_terminal. 

The story was unhinged enough to go viral. The token now has a market capitalization of over $730 million, while the chat bot’s public wallet now holds more than $2.7 million in crypto, largely driven by airdrops of other memecoins.

GOAT spawned a cottage industry of would-be follow-ups. On Thursday evening, each of the top eight trending tokens on the trading data site DEX Screener were AI-related, with many claiming to also be linked to some sort of “AI agent.”

For much of this year, memecoins have drawn inspiration from unserious things like funny pictures of animals or public figures. In this new memecoin market phase, traders are making it seem like they think something more serious is going on. 

One viral X thread and blog post author said truth_terminal represents “the birth of an entirely new category of coins/money,” and the saga is “unlocking portions of my brain I didn't know I possessed.”

“It's basically a new species of digital organism,” Miko Matsumura from gumi Cryptos Capital told me in a text.

Still, if all this AI agent business holds any real meaning, that significance remains elusive. To summarize multiple conversations I’ve had this week, “the truth_terminal story feels really important, but I can’t quite articulate my take on it.” And as Helius CEO Mert Mumtaz pointed out, “AI agents” may just be a sleight of hand rebranding of chat bots.

Memecoins now purport to be about something real though, and just having that pretense could be what’s responsible for the meme market pushing Solana metrics to all-time highs. 

“Financial nihilism is inherently self-limiting,” the popular anonymous account Sisyphus wrote of GOAT on X.

“Memecoins are a meaningless casino” isn’t a great sales pitch. “We’ve discovered a new frontier in AI” — whether that’s true or not — could be.

— Jack Kubinec

Something we used to cover a fair bit but don’t anymore is failed transactions on Solana:

According to data from 21co, Solana’s failed transaction rate has not increased despite the past week’s major boost in onchain activity. During April’s surge in activity, north of 70% of transactions were failing. This week, it’s around 35%. 

Some of this is due to Solana network upgrades. But somewhat strangely, the current level of failed transactions we’re seeing was first set after a memecoin named SolXEN seemingly started filtering out spam by taking up a lot of blockspace. 

In days of heavy transaction failure, bots were apparently spamming the network with transactions to try landing some. Today, bot runners seem to have moved onto a different strategy.

— Jack Kubinec

ICYMI — Stories you may have missed from Solana land this week:

• Magic Eden announced the TestME token claim from Oct. 29-31, allowing users to test the mobile claim process for its upcoming token, ME.

• Grass Foundation will kick off its airdrop on Oct. 28. The project is looking to build the first user-owned internet map, with staking and governance rights for eligible holders.

• Elmnts opened its public beta on Solana. It’s offering a compliant platform for tokenized funds backed by mineral rights royalties with an aim to attract institutional investors.

• Kraken Pro and Binance each launched perpetual futures for GOAT, offering up to 75x leverage on Binance and diverse collateral options on Kraken.

• Robinhood Crypto EU now supports SOL transfers with a 1% deposit rewards bonus for users, available through Nov. 30.

• VanEck EU enabled staking for its VSOL Solana ETP, managing $73 million in assets under management (AUM) in Europe.

• Jupiter Exchange interns unveiled FoX (Floating Odds eXchange), a tokenized betting platform with floating odds and DeFi integration, where users can trade odds on events like the 2024 US elections.

• Switchboard announced the launch of the Switchboard Foundation, dedicated to community-led governance with support from permissionless data feeds for decentralized infrastructure.

• Pump.fun added video tokenization to its platform. It also introduced Pump Advanced, a fast, no-fee trading terminal with features like mini charts and social stats.

• Jupiter Terminal now offers Dynamic Slippage, allowing projects to embed Solana’s liquidity directly on their sites and enabling frictionless swaps without extra configurations.

— Jeffrey Albus

A message from Ryan Connor, research manager at Blockworks Research: