Memecoins aren't dead. They just got replaced by a different casino.
Collector Crypt did flip PumpFun in daily revenue. That's real.
But look at what Collector Crypt actually is. You buy a random pack. You open it. You hope you hit a rare card. If you don't, you sell it back to the platform for 85 cents on the dollar.
That's a gacha machine. A slot pull with a Pokémon skin.
PumpFun was the same game. You buy a token. You hope the chart goes up. 99.74% of tokens launched on PumpFun never graduated. The house always won.
Now the #1 revenue app on Solana went from a memecoin casino to a trading card casino. The UI changed. The house edge didn't.
Collector Crypt takes 10-15% on every buyback. PumpFun took fees on every launch and swap. Same model. Different skin.
I looked at the revenue spike. Solflare embedded Collector Crypt's gacha packs directly into their wallet last week. Revenue jumped 129% in a week. That's a distribution play, not product-market fit. Ask PumpFun how sustainable $4.8M per day was. They're at $800K now.
Solana's killer app has always been a casino. The only thing that changes is the costume.
Why CT is ignoring TCGs:
I've participated in crypto for a little under a decade. There have been countless narrative driven pumps. Currently, the hottest topic is the TCG meta. However, it's quite obvious that the majority of CT is indifferent to TCGs. Why is that?
I believe that CT has become too accustomed to insider plays that have no intrinsic value. Two examples are NFTs in 2021-2022 and Memecoins in 2024-2025. Neither NFTs nor Memecoins were culturally relevant. They pumped purely due to speculation. Those that made the most money on these were either early or had inside information. Both metas were red hot, but by the end, basically every project/coin went straight to $0.
The reason is because after the speculation layer is removed, both NFTs/Memecoins are just vaporware. Additionally, retail has become wary of KOLs shilling trash. Every time that retail gets burned, they become less and less likely to buy what CT shills.
Now why are TCGs different? Unlike NFTs/Memecoins, it's real-world brands that are creating the assets. There is no way to "fork" Pokemon or One Piece. Additionally, these TCG manufacturers understand the concept of scarcity. In NFTs/Memecoins, if there is a runner, some scumbag will just create their own copy and PVP. In TCGs, PVP is simply not possible.
Additionally, even if TCGs do operate in cycles, they will always have underlying value. A Charizard or Gol D. Roger will always be valuable no matter the price. The same cannot be said of crypto assets, whose value is only self derived from price.
Since CT has been accustomed to investing in vaporware, most will completely miss the TCG trade. This is especially true of the CT 2024 class, that believes assets only pump once and then go -99% for the rest of their life cycle.
Now will TCGs pump forever? Probably not. But at the end of the day, even if everything crashes to $0, I still have a nice piece of cardboard to look at.