imo if your coin needs an “incentive” to hold it besides the narrative itself, then it was never a good coin in the first place even with "HOLDER" rewards, we've still seen coins go -90% over the last month because their narratives dried up and people realized the coins were not as good as they originally thought now people are trying to find reasons for the market to FORCE coins back up (incentives, new launchpads, etc). the truth is that this is like being rejected by a girl because she thinks you're ugly then trying to find another way to pull her its over, you gotta move on liquidity + novelty are the only things that will ever make people hold. we just saw multiple coins go 9-10 fig market cap because btc reversed + people were psyopping themselves with RWA pairings being the next big thing (RWAs as a whole have a bright future, but i still dont find pairing a memecoin to a stock super compelling. i said this at ATHs too: it just feels like memecoins last cycle but with one small change rather than something actually new) this is why its never the launchpads fault when coins go down, regardless of it being pumpfun, stonk, pons, or long yes, they should continue to innovate and foster a good environment for all types of trading/holding, but at the end of the day it's up to the coins launching there to be interesting enough to raise ceilings so the real issue at hand is that we need something "new" rather than just switching to another launchpad with hooks or higher starting market caps or block 0 taxes if it was this simple, we would've already switched by now i know it's easy to just say we "need something new," but the issue is you can't really predict what it'll be unless you build it yourself thematically im sure you could, like RWAs, AI, or whatever. but no one could've specifically predicted the bonding curve 3 years ago just like no one predicted RWA pairings 4 months ago. you just had to be on the lookout for something new and take full advantage of it when it arrived the reason most charts since september look depressing is because the market was euphoric then and overvaluing narratives now these coins are just being fairly repriced to down the downside (you can see this longer term with charts from AI meta in 2024) so yeah, i dont really understand what people like @jackduval mean when they say they want someone to replace pumpfun you will be met with the same issues today, since if pumpfun dies then all launchpads in their current forms will also die because none of the alternatives are doing something actually interesting that would "save the trenches"

contrary to prior belief, i very much miss the days of being able to find good narratives & actually hold them but how would one expect to adapt as a trader in this market when i put 10% of my networth into a top eco coin and it just slow bleeds to zero like this you can say maybe it was a bad trade to choose $TripleT (even tho idts), but this is exactly how 99% of the top charts look like from when i bought in early September August & September was my first time at seeing real volume and higher ceilings. it was pretty amazing to watch and it gives me a lot of hope for next time onchain heats up again, but there’s no telling when the next time that is onchain markets work exclusively based on incentives. right now there is zero incentive to hold anything for multiple days and it’s pretty depressing. i know a lot of people are upset and trying to find things to do to counteract the structures put in place, but idk to me that seems futile. maybe that’s the grim reality of it, but it doesn’t feel like anything any individual or group of individuals can do will move the needle. the only thing that can change it is liquidity like we saw in Aug/sept hopefully things get better sooner rather than later

in Q4 2023 there were like 8 new meme coins on ETH and 15 on SOL you had something stupid like a 50% chance of buying 100x+ minimum on SOL and SPX6900 was still on ETH at like $10 million mcap launchpads obviously made that infinitely worse