Propose an edit: The trenches

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**The trenches** is the collective name that [[crypto twitter]] gives to the most chaotic frontier of cryptocurrency speculation: the trading of brand new [[meme coin]] tokens in the minutes and hours after they are created, primarily on the [[Solana]] blockchain and above all on the launchpad [[pump.fun]]. To be "in the trenches" is to trade tokens that may be seconds old, against opponents that include automated bots, coordinated insiders and thousands of other traders, in a market where the overwhelming majority of tokens go to zero. The phrase functions simultaneously as a place name, a job description and an identity.

## Origin of the term

The expression is a war metaphor borrowed from the trench warfare of the First World War, and it circulated in crypto slang for years as a general way of describing hard conditions. Glossaries at Gate, Tangem and Bitget record that by the 2023 to 2024 Solana meme coin boom the phrase had narrowed into a specific meaning: the on chain battlefield of freshly launched tokens, where traders "endure [[rug pull|rug pulls]], chase early launches, and share survival stories of overnight wins and losses." The January 2024 launch of [[pump.fun]], which reduced token creation to a few clicks and a fraction of a SOL, industrialized that battlefield and fixed the term in daily use. Meme coin Telegram channels and X communities are themselves routinely called "the trenches," and participants call themselves trenchers, trench soldiers or degens.

## Daily rhythm

Life in the trenches runs on a loop that repeats around the clock. Deployers push out waves of new tokens, often themed around whatever is trending on [[crypto twitter]] or in mainstream news that hour; on peak days in 2024 and 2025 the Solana launchpads collectively produced tens of thousands of tokens per day, with [[LetsBonk]] alone recording more than 22,300 launches on a single day in July 2025.

Within the first seconds of a promising launch, [[sniping]] bots and insiders attempt to buy before human traders can react, sometimes using [[bundling|bundled]] wallets funded before launch to conceal a large combined position. Early buyers then sell into the demand of later buyers, a dynamic traders simply call PvP (player versus player), acknowledging that most meme coin trading is a zero sum contest between participants rather than investment in a product. Tokens that attract sustained buying complete their [[bonding curve]] and "graduate" to an open decentralized exchange; the vast majority never do. The cycle is punctuated by [[KOL]] calls, coordinated Telegram raids and the occasional organic viral moment that turns a throwaway joke into a nine figure token.

## Sociology

The trenches have a recognizable cast of actors, described in guides by Bitget and Gate and in market structure research by firms such as Solidus Labs:

* **Deployers and insiders**: the people who create tokens, sometimes honestly, often with pre positioned supply. Scandals such as the [[LIBRA scandal]] showed insider wallets extracting nine figure sums from a single launch.
* **Snipers and bots**: automated traders that buy in the first blocks of a launch and sell within minutes. Analysts attributed swings in the 2025 launchpad wars partly to a handful of high volume bot operators migrating between platforms.
* **[[jeet|Jeets]]**: traders who sell quickly at the first sign of profit or trouble. The word is used both as an insult and as self description.
* **[[KOL|KOLs]] and callers**: influencer accounts whose "calls" can move an illiquid token instantly. Marketing agencies openly sell KOL campaigns, and the line between enthusiasm and undisclosed paid promotion is a permanent controversy.
* **Copy traders**: users of tools that mirror the trades of profitable wallets automatically, which concentrates flows and accelerates both pumps and collapses.
* **Streamers**: since the rise of the [[streamer meta]], creators who broadcast live while their token trades, earning creator fees from the volume.

## Economics

The defining economic fact of the trenches is an extreme failure rate. A study by compliance firm Solidus Labs of more than seven million pump.fun tokens created between January 2024 and March 2025 found that 98.6 percent had collapsed below 1,000 dollars in liquidity, and Cointelegraph reported that fewer than 1.4 percent of tokens ever graduated from the bonding curve. By mid 2026, DEXTools reported that the graduation rate had fallen to roughly 0.26 percent. Even headline tokens follow the pattern: blockchain analysts found that nearly one million wallets lost a combined 3.81 billion dollars on the [[Official Trump]] token while entities linked to its creators earned more than 600 million dollars in fees.

The aggregate numbers are nonetheless enormous. Trading around the trenches drove Solana to record decentralized exchange volumes of 28.2 and 39.2 billion dollars on single days in January 2025, and pump.fun alone generated 124.7 million dollars in revenue in the first quarter of 2026, more than any other Solana application, even after activity had fallen sharply. The trenches are, in effect, a wealth transfer machine with a small house edge for platforms and infrastructure and a long tail of losses for late buyers.

## Culture and language

Trench culture is fatalistic, ironic and highly verbal. Its vocabulary blends older crypto slang (gm, wagmi, ngmi, aping, bags, diamond hands) with trench specific terms: getting rugged, getting jeeted on, "the dev sold," "cooked," "it's over" and "we are so back," often deployed within minutes of each other about the same token. Losses are performed publicly as content; screenshots of destroyed portfolios circulate as badges of honor. The culture also produces its own folklore, from the [[quant kid incident]], in which traders "revenge pumped" a token a minor had dumped on them, to the extreme broadcasts of the 2024 livestream era chronicled in the [[streamer meta]] article. Metas (shared narrative fashions such as celebrity coins, animal coins, or the [[ai agent meta]]) sweep through the trenches every few weeks, and identifying the next meta before it peaks is treated as the core skill of the trencher.

## Decline and persistence

The trenches boomed through 2024 and 2025 and then contracted violently in early 2026, when a broad crypto crash and fatigue with extraction saw Solana launchpad volumes fall by more than half from January highs; the episode is covered at [[2026 memecoin winter]]. Even so, reporting through mid 2026 recorded pump.fun usage recovering and creator focused features drawing new participants, suggesting that the trenches, like the memes they trade, die repeatedly without ever quite disappearing.

## References

* Bitget News, What are the trenches, a guide to Solana memecoin culture and slang: https://www.bitget.com/news/detail/12560605481869
* Gate Wiki, Trenches meaning on crypto Twitter: https://www.gate.com/crypto-wiki/article/trenches-meaning
* Tangem glossary, Trenches: https://tangem.com/en/glossary/trenches/
* CoinDesk, 98 percent of tokens on pump.fun report coverage: https://www.coindesk.com/business/2025/05/07/98-of-tokens-on-pump-fun-have-been-rug-pulls-or-an-act-of-fraud-new-report-says
* Cointelegraph, 98.6 percent of memecoins on pump.fun fail to even launch: https://cointelegraph.com/news/memecoins-pump-fun-99-percent-fail-launch
* Solidus Labs, Solana rug pulls and pump and dumps report: https://www.soliduslabs.com/reports/solana-rug-pulls-pump-dumps-crypto-compliance
* DEXTools News, Pump.fun in 2026, graduation rate collapses to 0.26 percent: https://www.dextools.io/news/pump-fun-graduation-collapse-solana-fees-2026
* CoinDesk, Trump token frenzy drives Solana stablecoin supply to 10 billion dollars and record DEX volumes: https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2025/01/24/trump-token-frenzy-drives-solana-stablecoin-supply-to-usd10b-record-dex-volumes
* Messari, State of Solana Q1 2026: https://messari.io/report/state-of-solana-q1-2026
* CNN Business, How Trump made more than 1 billion dollars on crypto while most of his coin's investors lost money: https://edition.cnn.com/2026/07/02/business/trump-memecoin-crypto-gains

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