The meme-coin industry has already earned a market value of over $47 billion, but token developers do not often reap substantial economic benefits out of the markets they trigger. While platforms have perfected their mechanisms of extraction, growing hundreds of millions of transactions, creators are left with a binary option: dump early or watch their projects die. The result of this misalignment has produced a predictable pattern of launch, hype, collapse, and repeat. However, there is a substantive change that is going on. Different strategies are emerging, all of which are trying to address the problem of the creator-economics dilemma. These paradigms represent diverse conceptions of how value should flow in attention-driven markets, where cultural momentum can orchestrate several million worth of trading in hours. The main question then becomes whether creators deserve to be compensated for what model may, in turn, draw compensation without compromising the economics of meme coins that make them. Strategy One: MemeX's Fee Redistribution Model MemeX, powered by the MemeCore mainnet, has introduced its own creator-first economic model. Rather than sharing a portion of trading fees with creators, MemeX routes the entire fee directly back into the ecosystem through systematic token buybacks. The mechanics are straightforward. User trades. MemeX buys tokens with the fee. Creator receives tokens. The cycle resets daily once traders hit 100M tokens in volume. No inflationary rewards. No minted tokens. Just real trading fees converted into creator rewards through open market purchases. The platform charges 2.5 percent of all transactions, which it then uses to buy the tokens of the trader in the open market and distributes them to the creator whose token was traded. This process creates a feedback mechanism of constant values, according to which trading activity directly supports the holdings of creators and provides constant buy pressure to the actively trading tokens. The MemeX model has the advantage of being linked to MemeCore, which is a Layer-1 blockchain specifically designed with Meme 2.0 economics in mind. The MemeCore ecosystem accords infrastructural benefits to MemeX, such as connectivity to $M-based reward mechanisms of staking and trading. Nevertheless, this model faces critique: MemeX will have to rely on token value growth or other ways of generating revenue to continue its activities. This may also be criticized by the fact that a 100 percent fee redistribution may encourage creators to remain active only to obtain buyback value, creating a temptation to reproduce the same dynamics practiced in dumping that the model aims to remove. Strategy Two: Pump.fun's Revenue-Sharing Partnership In January 2025, Pump.fun set a new record in its daily revenue of 15 million dollars in 24 hours. By the end of the same month, the Solana-based meme-coin launchpad had surpassed both Ethereum and Solana itself in 30-day revenue, pulling in 116.7 million. The platform has so far earned more than $836 million in cumulative fees to date since its initiation. On May 12, 2025, the creator revenue-sharing model of Pump.fun was launched. This site currently pays 0.05% of the volume of trade in a creator token to the creator as 50% of the revenue of PumpSwap. Creators are paid the equivalent of 5000 dollars worth of SOL after every 10 million in volumes, and this is compensated in real time through the blockchain. Statistics gathered by SolanaFloor reveal a bleak view of the distribution: only 1.8 percent of creators earned between $5,000 to $10,000, while 48 percent earned between $100 and $1,000. The average content creator on the platform earned just several hundred dollars, rather than thousands. Criticism arose swiftly. Some participants argued that the model would potentially motivate rug pulls since it would still pay creators who give up on projects. There were others who were worried that it would impede community-led takeovers of dormant tokens, as the original creators would still retain their own financial incentives. Strategy Three: LetsBonk's Ecosystem Alignment Model Pump.fun could not secure its dominance. In July 2025, the rival LetsBonk momentarily topped Pump.fun in its daily volumes, seizing 64 percent of the Solana meme-coin launchpad market. During the period between July 7 and July 23, LetsBonk generated slightly more revenue, reaching 7.9 million, compared to Pump.fun, which made 3.1 million. The ecosystem alignment is what LetsBonk did differently. The platform allocated 30 percent of its fees toward BONK token buybacks and burns, 30 percent toward BONKsol validator support, and 40 percent toward development. This strategy was not a pure profit pillaging but rather a direct reinvestment in the Solana ecosystem. The community-first model, therefore, appealed to the traders who wanted access to platforms that promote the overall ecosystem health. Yet, it was a short-lived advantage. LetsBonk's model demonstrated that ecosystem alignment can generate enthusiasm and capture market share rapidly, but couldn't sustain competitive advantage. The approach proved that community values matter to traders, but values alone don't guarantee sustained platform dominance in attention-driven markets. The Broader Pattern: Competing Visions The meme-coin sector is running several parallel experiments. Each model makes fundamentally different trade-offs: MemeX's thesis: MemeX ensures a 100% buyback of fees to creators in a move to end extraction. This approach is theoretically strong as it has been supported by the massive ecosystem scaffolding of MemeCore. The initial traction indicators show a strong level of community involvement; still, the issues with sustainability in the long run are a matter of concern. MemeX's thesis: Pump.fun's approach: Pump.fun follows a business model that ensures control of the platform and distributes half of the revenue of PumpSwap to creators. It is a model which maintains traditional platform economics but assigns value to creators. Pump.fun has cumulative fees of over US $836.million, which proves that the business model is being scaled. Nevertheless, the distribution of creator earnings is also quite skewed - the vast majority make hundreds of thousands instead of thousands of dollars, and there are concerns that partial revenue sharing may be an adequate measure of lessening the motivation towards rug pulls. Pump.fun's approach: LetsBonk's model: The LetsBonk model allocates the fee revenue to ecosystem tokens and validator infrastructure to ensure that platform performance correlates with Solana health. The model generated initial enthusiasm and briefly captured dominant market share, but couldn't sustain momentum against competitors with stronger liquidity and execution advantages. Although the principles of maintaining ecosystem congruency were attractive to communities, but alone isn't sufficient for lasting competitive differentiation. LetsBonk's model: Conventional variants, such as the LaunchLab of Raydium and the Launchpad of MEXC, offer a mix of reduced fees, increased liquidity, or exchange listing opportunities; they compete on infrastructure as much as they do on creator incentives and user experience. The Unresolved Question The meme coin market hit $47.1 billion in market cap as of November 2025. In January 2025, more than 1.7 million new tokens were launched on various platforms, and this serves to demonstrate the enormous proliferation of tokens. However, there are structural barriers to sustainability. Nonetheless, there is still expansion of the market. In recent scholarly studies of meme coin markets on Solana, it can be seen that certain trader types follow a spider web build, where earnings distribution is even, or a sunflower pattern, where gains are concentrated at the center, among sustainable projects, respectively. However, it is not entirely clear whether the catalyzing effect of creator revenue sharing, in any form, will lead to the maturation of the ecosystem. For the first time, platforms are experimenting with paying creators for building instead of dumping. Whether that remuneration will be adequate to change behavioral patterns established over two years of rewarding through extraction will depend on its implementation, scale, and the willingness of creators to remain engaged in the presence of good incentives. Two years of extraction optimization of the meme-coin economy have passed. Currently, several platforms are seeking alternative incentive schemes. Which model works, or whether any of them do, remains an open question that billions of dollars in market cap are currently betting on.

The is an opinion piece based on the author’s POV and does not necessarily reflect the views of HackerNoon.

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