If you're over 25, you're already too old for meme coins

A top-tier esports professional typically excels to an extreme degree in these areas—reaction speed, hand-eye coordination, multitasking ability, game strategy and awareness, mental resilience, focus, and endurance.

Take Faker, the greatest of all time in League of Legends, for example. His reaction time is a staggering 106 milliseconds, while the average person's reaction time is as high as 200–220 milliseconds. In-game, he not only controls his own champion but also frequently switches the camera to other areas of the map to gather information and make strategic decisions. Countless highlight reels showcase his micro-mechanics precise to the millisecond. After hitting a low point in 2018 due to age, he was able to return to the top of the world stage thanks to his strong mentality.

Meme coins were traditionally seen as a game of creativity and narrative imagination. But today, this game has fundamentally changed—it's a global competition to capture hype. The abilities of the top players in this game are approaching the level of esports professionals. Even more, actual esports players have joined the fray. The difficulty of standing out and winning rewards in this game has far exceeded our imagination.

Pump.fun is already the world's largest 24/7 online esports platform.

"New Gen Trading"

This is a new term coined by the English-speaking crypto community for meme coin trading. This name reflects a new trend in current meme coin trading—younger players, aggressive, frequent, and rapid trading.

Compared to the term "PvP" still more widely used in our Chinese-speaking community, "New Gen Trading" sounds more appealing, but it cannot hide the brutal competition behind it—players must be armed to the teeth to capture the latest trends, sell at highs without any hesitation or delusion.

58 seconds. That's the current average holding time for meme coins on the Solana chain. Three years ago, the average holding time was as long as one day.

In this month's statistics on pump.fun user trading, about 47.5% of users were at a loss, and about 49.7% of users cashed out profits not exceeding $500. If you can cash out profits above $500, you are already among the top 1.36% in the market.

But the wave after wave of meme coin players aim to make life-changing money. If that standard is $50,000 or more, then you need to beat 99.6% of people.

How difficult is it to beat 99.6% of people? Let's review the perspective of the recently viral top trader @clukz. His realized lifetime profits are already around $2 million.

To Make Money, You Need to Be Swift as the Wind

First, a tweet appeared in his X feed. It was a retweet by Solana co-founder toly of a post from the White House's official X account. Toly's tweet contained only an image.

What was toly trying to express? It doesn't matter. In the video, clukz muttered to himself, "What is this?" and immediately used Google to search the image. He discovered the character in the picture sent by toly is called "Lrrr."

From seeing the tweet to finding the correct result, it took him only 7 seconds.

By then, his token monitoring feed had already popped up several new tokens using this image. Finding the correct answer is the foundation for winning this round. How long it takes determines the upper limit of potential winnings:

From getting the correct answer to his first buy order—the process of searching for the ticker and executing the purchase—took a mere 4 more seconds. This allowed him to acquire about 19% of the supply when the token's market cap was only $4,000.

Three seconds after the successful purchase, the token's market cap reached $26,000, a 4x increase. clukz began his first sell order at this point and sold off all his holdings in batches over the next 3 minutes.

Ultimately, on this token, he secured a $3,000 profit in just over 3 minutes.

Next was a token from a pump.fun tweet. He captured the keyword "early" that appeared repeatedly in the tweet:

From the appearance of this tweet to him typing "early" to search for related tokens, it took him only 2 seconds to react.

He didn't act immediately but waited until a token appeared whose image, name, and ticker best matched the original tweet before buying. According to him, for these instant, tweet-driven hype events, having a name that fully matches the tweet content is very important:

After this token meeting his criteria appeared, he clicked buy in less than 1 second. He placed two buy orders of 10 SOL each, but the average market caps at the time of these two purchases were vastly different—$5,500 and $18,000 respectively.

Two seconds after the purchases were complete, he started selling, again clearing his entire position within 3 minutes. On this token, he realized a profit of about $8,400.

Next was the most exaggerated scene. He saw the Dogecoin official Twitter account change its profile picture, all while he was playing Fortnite:

He immediately alt-tabbed out of the game. Before he could even search for possible tickers, a new token had already popped up in his monitoring feed, so he decisively bought. This action, from switching out of the game to buying, again took only 2 seconds. After abandoning a Fortnite match to join a meme coin game, he sold all the way up, securing another $5,000.

When breaking news renders the original narrative invalid, many players might resign themselves to bad luck due to slow reactions. But clukz demonstrated the reaction speed of a top player—no luck, all reaction and speed.

First, the "Lobster" founder quoted a tweet saying "Wall Street has lobsters." He immediately selected the $LOBSTER token based on the tweet's keywords and bought:

Then, the "Lobster" founder replied with a new name, "bullclaw." He decisively pressed the 100% sell button, causing a massive red candle:

Then, within 2 seconds, he bought $bullclaw. In the end, he made about $1,000 on the wrong "lobster" and about $6,700 on the correct "lobster."

Strength knows no language barrier. clukz isn't just adept on Solana. In the video, he instantly bought "futiure" from a tweet by He Yi and "Binance Wooden Fish" related to Binance merchandise. This requires a deep understanding of the narrative angles within the Chinese meme coin community.

When a foreigner can be faster than us Chinese even on BSC, the difficulty of this game can truly be described as hellish.

The "Esportification" of Meme Trading

clukz is indeed a former Fortnite professional player.

Between 2021 and 2025, he played for 7 different teams. As a former Fortnite pro, his career wasn't particularly successful, with total lifetime earnings of only $5,630. He participated in S-tier regional tournaments, but his best finish was only 24th place. In numerous smaller weekly tournaments, he never won, with his best result being third place.

In 2025, in the last two S-tier regional tournaments he participated in, a total of 6 players won (3 per team), earning tickets to the world finals. The combined lifetime earnings of these 6 players totaled just over $900,000.

In late April 2025, clukz began his疯狂的 daily meme coin money-printing mode. At the end of every week, he never closed at a loss. In the eyes of the opponents who defeated him as recently as August 2025, he might have been just a minor adversary. But in just one year, he has earned far more dollars than these opponents did over their 5-year or longer Fortnite professional careers.

Bringing his talent to meme coins completely changed clukz's career trajectory. And he's not the only former esports pro doing this. Other top traders in the space, like @orangie and @meggafaze, also have backgrounds as Fortnite professional players.

The "esportification" of meme coin trading doesn't narrowly refer to esports players joining the meme speculation camp. Rather, it means that making money trading meme coins itself now has barriers to entry similar to esports. Just like playing an FPS game requires a good monitor, mouse, keyboard, headset, and sound card, with repeated adjustments until these peripherals allow the player to perform at their best.

At the very least, to beat others and harvest profits in the meme coin competition, you need a sufficiently powerful desktop PC and fast enough internet. It's like ensuring the game runs smoothly and your ping is low. Otherwise, you lose at the starting line.

The "minimum configuration for dog trading" suggested by the GMGN founder.

After keeping up with the hardware and network-level "arms race," what awaits players to hone are the "esports player abilities" like clukz's:

- You need to sit in front of the computer for long hours every day, watching the latest posts from key Twitter accounts. clukz says he sits in front of the computer for 16 hours a day.

- You need to develop the keen sense to connect these posts to meme coins. Top players react in mere seconds.

- You cannot hesitate; you need to make quick decisions. clukz says, "Bundling isn't that important. In the first 10–20 seconds, everyone is competing on speed; no one cares about token distribution."

- You need to ruthlessly sell your low-cost holdings all the way up, harboring no delusions of "diamond hands" making you rich.

- Facing failure, you need the conviction that you will win. Even someone as strong as clukz admits the videos he releases are highlight reels. Making money isn't easy; 80% of the time he still gets trapped, sandwiched, rugged by devs, or buys the wrong coin.

For a complete novice, you also need to learn to use trading and tweet monitoring tools, familiarize yourself with the culture and logic that cause pumps in this game...

This is brutal competition. Your profits and losses are wrested from the hands of countless traders behind screens.

Conclusion

As veterans in the crypto space, we still tend to interpret the current market through the lens of past perceptions of meme coins. Precisely because of this, during tough market conditions, there are many voices saying "pump.fun/meme coins have ruined cryptocurrency."

But the game of speculation never stops. The young people newly entering crypto see precisely this kind of brutal market. In their eyes, meme coins still represent a hope for rapidly changing their lives. It's just that it's no longer a creativity game about who's cooler or which community is more cohesive, but a brutal, cutthroat battle.

In the latest poll initiated by pump.fun's official Twitter, "community conviction" still won by an overwhelming margin. Everyone misses the old days that were fun and simple, where you could hold a meme coin and sleep peacefully.

But there are always young people. Whether we like it or not, no matter how much we miss the past, there will always be newcomers interpreting the market in their own way and finding a way to survive in this market environment.