Data Analysis: Which Meme Coin Holders Have Higher Conviction?

Before we officially start this article, let’s take a brief look at the background.

• Our analytical research shows that memecoin has high L1 asset properties (and is more likely to outperform L1).

• We view meme coins as leveraged bets on various themes/narratives and ecosystems.

• We are only interested in meme coins that have reached a certain escape velocity. This removes 99% of the market share - we focus on blue chip meme coins with sufficient liquidity. (Note: This article was published before TRUMP was released)

By the way, I remember watching an interview with Paul Tudor Jones in 2020. He mainly talked about Bitcoin. He mentioned that Stanley Druckenmiller told him that 80% of Bitcoin holders held Bitcoin from $20,000 all the way down to $3,000 (after the 2017 cycle). This is an interesting data. This gave Paul Tudor Jones the conviction to invest in Bitcoin. When we analyze meme coins and wallet groups, we are looking for similar obvious data.

But please remember that memecoin is very dangerous and unstable.

Only invest in things you are willing to lose, and always do your research.

Let’s look at the data…

1. Token holder growth

summary:

• SPX6900 is the only meme coin whose holders of $1,000 are growing faster than its overall holders.

• Note that many assets have seen price declines over the past 30 days, which could skew the data. Fartcoin (up 94%), AI16z (up 81%), and SPX6900 (up 52%) were the best performing assets over the past month.

• GIGA is an outlier in the data as its price has been flat over the past 30 days but has still been able to keep growing among its $1,000 holders.

2. Token holding belief

(1) Average and median holdings

summary:

• SPX6900 again stands out as its median holdings across all Ethereum addresses are 369% higher than Pepe, the second-highest meme by median holdings per wallet. It also has the highest average balance.

• Solana’s SPX6900 tells a different story, as the median holdings are just 25% of what we see on Ethereum. This is consistent with the market’s view of the two networks: Ethereum tends to attract more TVL and higher value transactions than Solana.

• Based Brett on Base L2 is the most “gamified” meme. We are still investigating what happened, but from the chart below we can see that there were three large increases in token holders. Insiders appear to have airdropped hundreds of thousands of wallets to promote marketing/community building. This is nothing new, the Bonk team has done this in the past (including airdrops to Solana phone buyers).

Generally speaking, we can see that most memecoin “investors” only operate in the range of a few hundred dollars — potentially investing in multiple projects.

Once again, SPX6900 stands out on Ethereum because its community seems to have more conviction than any other meme.

(2) Investors with a capital of more than US$1,000

summary:

• Once again, SPX6900 attracted attention, with 36% of users holding more than $1,000, compared to an average of 14.2% for other popular memes with more than $1,000.

• Pepe stands out among the “big memes” with 18% of wallets holding more than $1,000.

• Rounding out the top five are Fartcoin, AI16z, and MOG.

(3) Investors with a capital of more than US$100,000

summary:

• Once again, SPX6900 tops the charts with the highest percentage of wallets above $100,000. Some people think this is bad because it indicates that large holders may be "selling" to retail investors. I think the opposite is true. In my opinion, the higher the percentage of people holding positions above $100,000, the more people have high confidence in this asset. In some ways, SPX6900 may develop similar properties to BTC in the meme.

• Fartcoin and AI16z (both on Solana) show a staggering number of wallets holding over $100,000.

(4) Percentage of wallets with less than $100

summary:

• SPX6900 has more wallets with more than $1,000 (12,914) on Ethereum, and fewer wallets with less than $100 (9,920). Again, this is an outlier. No other meme comes close on this metric. In fact, only 29% of SPX wallets on Ethereum hold less than $100. Pepe ranks second with 43% of wallets holding less than $100.

• For reference: Pepe (the second-largest holder in this category) has 7.6 wallets with more than $1,000 and 179,000 wallets with less than $100.

• You can see that the bottom 4 assets have a high concentration of wallets under $100. We believe these meme coins are more centralized, with insiders conducting marketing campaigns and airdrops - which gives this category this look.

3. Whale Growth

Whale wallet 30-day growth rate

summary:

• It’s a bit surprising to see Fartcoin and AI16z at the top of the list. Both assets were launched in October and have seen significant growth over the past 30 days. Given that prices are up 94% and 81% respectively over that period, it makes sense that wallets above $100,000 would have grown. Both assets are fairly volatile though, so it’s interesting to see what seems to be a significant number of holders showing high confidence.

• In the past month, Bonk has fallen 14%, but its number of $100,000 wallets has fallen 69%, indicating that many large holders may have taken profits recently. This could put Bonk's floor price in the $0.000026-$0.000028 range.

4. Whale Retention Rate

Our goal with this metric is to look at all wallets that have held more than $100,000 over the life of the asset. We then compare this number to the number of wallets that still hold more than $100,000. We think this metric gives us some insight into the long-term conviction of large holders.

*Please note that our current dataset is missing some large Ethereum memes. We will share the data once we have it.

summary:

SPX6900 has exceeded expectations in this regard. 86% of holders who once held more than $100,000 in tokens still hold at least that level of positions, even though the token price is currently 34% below its all-time high. It can be said that this is a frenzy.

5. Insider Trading

Our focus here is to identify tokens with obvious “conspiracy” characteristics. To do this, we looked at the total number of wallets that received tokens in the first week after the launch. We then filtered out “internal wallets” based on “wallets that received tokens but had less than 5 previous transactions.”

The logic is that a crypto user who received tokens in the first week and made fewer than 5 transactions is unlikely to not be an internal wallet.

summary:

• Of the 5 assets for which we were able to obtain data, SPX once again came out on top.

• Pepe had a large number of token recipients in the first week (45k), with a high percentage of “insiders”.

• Based on Brett owning 55% of internal wallets, this does not surprise us. Of all the memes we analyzed, this token appears to be the most centralized.

6. Conclusion

I want to be clear that we are still in the early stages of gleaning insights from the data. Please note that some of the data may be noisy (note that asset prices may distort some metrics).

We believe we can learn a lot by analyzing wallet groups.

So, what have we learned?

• SPX6900 ranked first in 6 of the 9 datasets. It ranked second in one dataset. The 30-day growth rate of whale wallets ranked third. This gave it an overall score of 9 points.

• The second-best asset in terms of overall score is AI16z with 21 points.

• Fartcoin ranked third with a total score of 28 points.

Finally, I would like to say:

• Note that there are different ways to look at and interpret the data. You could argue that it's a bad thing that a large percentage of holders are still holding onto their tokens. You could argue that the percentage of holders under $100 should be higher. I don't think so, and I think a higher percentage of wallets holding large amounts of tokens indicates more confidence. But you can question the way I interpret this data and come up with your own opinion.

• Our data is limited to on-chain data and does not include centralized exchange data. WIF, Bonk, Shiba Inu, Pepe, and GIGA are all traded on platforms such as Binance and Coinbase.

• Let’s assume we didn’t include the SPX6900 token on Base in our dataset. From what we can tell, it looks like there was an airdrop event (possibly multiple) that skewed the data, so we removed it. The token has 72,012 wallets, but only 1,929 of them hold more than $1,000 (2.6%). The median balance is $0.000001. The real activity for SPX6900 is happening on Ethereum and Solana.

The conclusions we draw do not imply that these assets will outperform in the future. In fact, if BTC underperforms in the coming months, I would not expect any of these assets to perform well.

But if you think BTC will perform well in the coming months, it might be wise to form a data-driven view on what the “blue chip meme” will look like in 2025. These datasets can help you do that.