The Memecoin strategy strictly implemented by Solana

In 24 years, Solana strictly implemented the Memecoin strategy formulated by Messari. The transaction volume of the single chain surpassed the entire Ethereum ecosystem

There was no consensus at the Hong Kong Consensus Conference in February 2026. There was no main thread in the crypto market in Q1 2026.

In 24 years, Solana strictly implemented the Memecoin strategy formulated by Messari. The transaction volume of the single chain surpassed the entire Ethereum ecosystem, becoming the first L1 in history to win the block space war with the Ethereum ecosystem.

But the foundation of Solana's victory is not solid. The fundamentals of Memecoin, which consists of the trinity of attention, Fomo sentiment and liquidity, saw a sharp drop in on-chain transaction volume due to the holiday effect. The weak LP pool could not support the high FDV/LP ratio, and in February 25, it staged a retreat greater than Dunkirk.

The old king has fallen, and the new king is still behind the scenes. Standing at the juncture of March, a month of ever-changing circumstances, we make a blind guess about the main plot of the future.

Among the chaotic market structures, a clue is emerging: funds are flowing from narrative-only on-chain PVP to Yield Farming supported by fundamentals.

There are three categories of representative projects:

--Sonic's neoclassical coins, a more powerful version of Ve (3, 3);

--The new (3,3,3) model of BeraChain and Initia, and the chained version of the (3,3) mechanism of Olympus DAO;

--DePIN projects represented by Aethir, a variant of YiledFarming with real income and positive externalities.

The market mindshare of Sonic, BeraChain, and Initia is quite high, while the DePIN track has been lacking in market discussion after being silent for a year.

However, the most bullish track in Messari’s 25-year outlook report is DePIN, and it is recommended that Solana return its strategic focus to DePIN in 25 years.

As we all know, the trick to obtain Alpha returns is to take narrow paths and cultivate thin fields. The less interested DePIN is, the more worthy it is of our in-depth layout.

The above picture shows the top DePIN project data compiled by CryptoDep. In the top 5 revenue rankings, in addition to the familiar Aethir, io.net, and Akash, there are two newcomers Braintrust and GEODNET.

Among them, Aethir topped the DePIN project list with $10M in 30-day revenue. I checked Aethir's GPU Dashboard and found that the project has achieved an annual recurring revenue (ARR) of $105 million, provided 487 million hours of computing power, distributed more than 3.6 billion ATH token rewards, and had nearly 1 million on-chain transactions.

I originally thought that it would take years for real income model pricing to be recognized in the crypto market, but looking at Aethir’s growth trajectory, perhaps that day will come sooner than we thought.

Aethir is so successful, on the one hand, because of its differentiated competitive strategy. It did not follow the route of other DePIN projects that focused on edge device networks + long-tail market demand, but chose to use NVIDIA high-performance GPUs (such as NVIDIA H100) to build a decentralized cloud computing platform to provide enterprise-level GPU computing power for AI and game developers around the world; on the other hand, the Aethir team seized the AI x Crypto trend in Q1 24 and successfully raised funds to purchase a large number of high-end GPUs, which created Aethir's moat and helped Aethir achieve network effects as soon as possible. And Aethir's network effect has attracted more enterprise-level GPU computing power suppliers to join.

Recently, there has been a view in the market that open source low-cost models such as DeepSeek will reduce the demand for NVIDIA's high-end graphics cards. This has caused many investors to feel anxious about the sustainability of Aethir's revenue. However, this view is actually market noise deliberately created by financial market manipulators some time ago, and it is a bit unfounded to feel anxious about it.

Nvidia's "leather jacket yellow" has already publicly refuted this view, and there is also the "Jevons effect" at work. Simply put, open source models such as DeepSeek will not reduce the demand for high-end GPUs, but will stimulate demand growth. After DeepSeek became popular, the scale of the domestic Maas (model as a service) reasoning market has surged, saving many computing centers that were almost dead.

Moreover, paradigm innovation in the field of AI is in the ascendant. In addition to LLM, embodied AI has become a hot spot for capital. Embodied AI will become the engine to ignite Aethir'