Solana (SOL) has been downtrending and retracing heavily over the past month. The asset has declined 40% since its Jan. 19 all-time high of $293, and the trend seems set to continue as meme coin mania fades. Moreover, SOL is down a further 8% on the day, falling below $170 for the first time since early November.

Solana’s popularity and high usage in recent months have been primarily driven by meme coin minting and speculation, but that has started falling.

Degens have flocked to the low-cost blockchain to mint and shill meme coins on platforms like Pump.fun. The vast majority of these spurious tokens have no utility and serve no purpose, and a high percentage were pump-and-dump schemes.

Game Over For Solana?

“Its over for Solana,” lamented crypto trader ‘Xremlin’ who added it is “Worse than the FTX collapse.”

The trader blamed the MELANIA token, the namesake coin of the First Lady launched just days after TRUMP, and LIBRA, a token allegedly promoted by Argentina’s president Javier Milei, which he has denied.

Insider trading caused pump and dumps liquidating retail traders, adding to the fall of Solana, the analyst said.

“This past month showed how bad things are on Solana’s meme scene. Mostly, it’s insiders making money while everyone else loses. Today, the SOL price began responding to this sentiment.”

Its over for Solana

Worse than the FTX collapse$LIBRA, #MELANIA changed everything

: Here’s what went down and what’s next pic.twitter.com/mo6TMBpift

Meanwhile, crypto investor “Ash Crypto” said we now know the real reason that Solana meme coins started dying. Insiders have been sniping these meme coin launches and selling to dump on retail, he said.

“Insiders have extracted $200+ Million from these Solana launches so far.”

“Solana and SOL memes are dumping hard because people are realizing this whole game was rigged, and it was all just wealth transfer/value extraction from crypto gamblers to project insiders,” he said in a separate post.

Others posted some shocking statistics about how much has been extracted from Solana meme coins:

calculated the total extracted from memes on solana:

trading bots apps: 1.09bn

pumpfun: 492m

MEV: 1.5-2bn

Trump insiders: 0.5-1bn

Other insiders: unknown

AMMs: 0-2bn

Total: 3.6-6.6+ bn

Sources in the next tweet

Ethereum Makes Surprise Move

As if in response to the SOL slump, ETH prices have bucked the market trend, topping $2,830 in a 12-day high on Monday.

However, market momentum was too much for the asset to overcome and ETH fell back below $2,700 again during trading in Asia on Tuesday.

Total market cap is down 3% on the day at $3.27 trillion and SOL is the largest loser in the top 40 crypto assets while Solana-based meme coins are not far behind.