Behind the “Solara” Hype: Meme Creators Are Finally Earning from Protocols

The rise of meme coins with Chinese names has spread from BSC to Base, and now it’s made its way to Solana. This morning, the Solana token “索拉拉” surged from a market cap near $2 million to a peak of over $20 million—delivering a tenfold gain in just a single morning.

This development is notable. A few days ago, the social protocol platform Trends kicked off a campaign to “find a Chinese name for Solana,” offering a 100 SOL prize pool. Participants entered by quoting and retweeting the official post, submitting their proposed Chinese name for Solana. The reward structure: 66 SOL for the best proposal tweet, 33 SOL for second place, and 1 SOL awarded randomly to one participant. With growing enthusiasm for Chinese meme coins, the 100 SOL prize generated significant attention.

After the campaign launched, Solana’s official account, founder Toly, and Foundation Chair Lily Liu all amplified Trends’ activity on social media, engaging actively with the community. The campaign attracted wide participation, including from the English-speaking crypto community.

In the end, English-speaking user muper (@easytopredict) emerged as the winner. Inspired by Lily Liu’s post, he and his team created “索拉拉,” an energetic, long-haired builder girl persona. Driven by SOL and growing interest in Chinese meme coins, “索拉拉” reached a $20 million market cap within hours.

“索拉拉” is now also the X profile avatar of Solana Foundation Chair Lily Liu.

Trends, the launchpad behind “索拉拉,” has taken center stage after this highly successful token launch. Many market participants believe “索拉拉” could kick off a new wave of Chinese meme coin activity on Solana, led by Trends. But Trends’ potential goes much further. As an emerging platform redefining “ICM,” this launch highlights the limitless possibilities of “information tokenization.”

Mutual Benefits for Creators and Users in Trend Discovery

Beyond the 66 SOL event reward, this morning at approximately 10:30 UTC, muper—the creator behind the Chinese name “索拉拉”—had already earned more than $20,000 in creator earnings. He expects to surpass $100,000 in creator earnings on the Trends platform soon and has pledged to give back to the community.

This recalls Binance Life on BSC. The market-popular “Binance Life” concept was introduced by influencer Chen Jian, who initially received no compensation until Binance proactively rewarded him. Chen Jian’s idea not only led to the creation of “Binance Life,” which reached over $500 million in market cap, but also sparked the BSC meme bull run.

Binance awarded Chen Jian 100 BNB—worth over $100,000. However, such generosity is rare and depends on finding a sponsor like Binance. In most situations, meme coin revenues stay with the issuer and creators earn nothing.

The most notable example is Pepe. The global cultural icon’s meme coin, $pepe, has a market cap approaching $3 billion and ranks 50th among all cryptocurrencies. Yet Pepe’s creator, Matt Furie, has not received any proceeds from the massive valuation of the pepe coin.

When creators do not receive compensation, conflicts can arise between creators and meme coins, jeopardizing successful projects. ChillGuy is another IP that went viral from TikTok to Douyin and then to China; its meme coin once reached a $500 million market cap. But at a key moment, ChillGuy’s creator filed a copyright lawsuit, instantly reversing market sentiment and causing a rapid decline.

Trends.fun’s creator revenue-sharing mechanism addresses this major issue in the meme market. Its incentive structure allows creators to earn rewards directly from market-driven value discovery. With “索拉拉,” Trends.fun has enabled a positive cycle: broad participation and creativity from the crypto community, attention and a loyal audience for creators, and giving back to the community after achieving success. Creators don’t need to rely on the generosity of any single party—they benefit directly by capturing social media momentum and trends.

Information Capital Market: A New Definition of ICM

For most, “ICM” brings to mind platforms like Believe and icm.run, where ICM stands for “Internet Capital Market”—Web2 enterprises issuing tokens and fundraising via blockchain infrastructure.

Trends.fun’s version of “ICM” means “Information Capital Market”: in short, infrastructure for tokenizing Twitter posts.

While “Internet Capital Market” is widely seen as Solana’s favored sector, Trends.fun’s “Information Capital Market” has also received strong backing from Solana. As meme launchpads compete in a commoditized market, Trends.fun’s approach of “tweet tokenization” has won support from industry leaders. This star-studded investor list highlights that:

Investors include Solana co-founder @aeyakovenko, Solana Foundation Chair Lily Liu, Jupiter co-founder Meow, Siong, Kaito AI founder Yu Hu, LayerZero Labs co-founder Bryan Pellegrino, Magic Eden co-founder Zhuoxun Yin, among others.

Trends.fun enables near-zero-barrier tweet tokenization. Users can issue tokens for any Twitter post using a streamlined process, at a cost as low as 0.016 SOL. The platform provides transparent dashboards for each tweet-based token, displaying holder counts, real-time market cap, trading activity, and creator information.

True to its name, Trends.fun encourages users to create tokens around content. Capital-driven token price performance is used to reflect or capture real social media trends. Any attempts to inflate engagement metrics (likes, retweets, comments) using bots are exposed by the token’s price action. Users can create tokens from tweet links with no initial liquidity required and earn a 20% share of transaction fees. In this model, tokens serve as both information filters and value-capture tools.

Trends.fun will expand to tokenizing more social media content, such as TikTok. This marks the early stage of a large-scale content trend prediction market, which is poised for rapid growth. With Trends, users can create content aligned with emerging trends, instantly capture hot topics across social platforms, and invest in content before it goes viral.

This is a virtuous cycle for content creation and tokenization—the most effective tool for capturing social media trends and a distinctive prediction market.

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