Editing Trenches

**Trenches** (usually **the trenches**; trading there is **trenching**) is crypto slang for the earliest and riskiest stage of on-chain memecoin trading, chiefly brand-new [[Solana]] tokens on launchpads such as [[pump.fun]]. Its traders are called trenchers or degens.[^1]

## Usage
The term names both a phase, a token's first minutes and hours, and a place: launchpads, decentralised exchanges and memecoin chat groups.[^1] The war metaphor refers to conditions in which bots, insiders and scams are common and most tokens die quickly; the term has spread to early-stage speculation generally.[^1] It also stands for the retail crowd as a market force: in July 2025, after [[LetsBonk]] took 69% of Solana launchpad deployments to pump.fun's 19%, data scientist Adam Tehc told Decrypt it was up to pump.fun's team "to convince the trenches".[^2]

## How it works
Most trench tokens start on a [[Bonding curve]] and trade there until they graduate to a [[Liquidity pool|liquidity pool]]. Traders buy within seconds of launch through browser terminals and Telegram bots; [[Axiom]], a Y Combinator-backed terminal, generated $100 million in fees about four months after its early-access launch, according to Dune and Token Terminal data cited by The Block.[^3] Common approaches include [[Sniping]] launches, following [[KOL]] calls and [[Copy trading]] wallets labelled "smart money", which one study calls "the dominant entry strategy in meme coin markets".[^4] Traders contend with [[Bundling]] by creators and with [[Rug pull|rug pulls]].[^4]

## Outcomes
Solidus Labs found that of more than 7 million pump.fun tokens with at least five trades deployed between January 2024 and March 2025, about 97,000 kept liquidity above $1,000.[^5] CoinGecko found that from April 2024 to late 2025 most active pump.fun traders ended each month with a realised loss; the profitable share bottomed at 30.08% in June 2025 and reached 73.28% in April 2026.[^6]

## See also
- [[Glossary of trenching terms]]
- [[List of memecoin traders]]
- [[Mint authority]]
- [[Community takeover]]

## References
1. [What are "the trenches"? A guide to Solana memecoin culture and slang](https://crypto.news/what-are-the-trenches-solana-memecoin-culture-slang/), crypto.news, 2026-06-29
2. [Pump.fun Revenue Plummets as Meme Coin Traders Tap Other Launchpads](https://decrypt.co/332091/pump-fun-revenue-plummets-meme-coin-traders-tap-launchpads), Decrypt, 2025-07-28
3. [Axiom exchange hits $100 million in revenue just four months after launch](https://www.theblock.co/post/355676/axiom-exchange-hits-100-million-in-revenue-just-four-months-after-launch), The Block, 2025-05
4. [Resisting Manipulative Bots in Meme Coin Copy Trading: A Multi-Agent Approach with Chain-of-Thought Reasoning](https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08641), arXiv (WWW '26), 2026-01-13
5. [The 2025 Rug Pull Report: Rug Pulls and Pump-and-Dumps on Solana](https://www.soliduslabs.com/reports/solana-rug-pulls-pump-dumps-crypto-compliance), Solidus Labs, 2025-05
6. [Pump.fun Traders Are Making a Comeback](https://www.coingecko.com/research/publications/pump-fun-traders-are-making-a-comeback), CoinGecko, 2026-05-07