Author: Cookie, Rhythm

A top esports professional player is usually exceptional in these areas: reaction speed, hand-eye coordination, multitasking ability, game strategy and awareness, mental resilience, focus, and endurance.

For example, Faker, the top player in League of Legends, has an astonishing reaction time of only 106 milliseconds, while the average person's reaction time is as high as 200-220 milliseconds. In the game, he not only controls his own champion but also frequently switches the game screen to other areas of the map to obtain information and make command decisions. His micro-operations with millisecond precision are numerous. After experiencing a slump due to age starting in 2018, he was able to return to the top of the world with his strong mentality.

Meme coins, once typically seen as a game of creativity and narrative imagination, have undergone a complete transformation—becoming a global popularity contest. The top players are approaching the level of esports professionals. Furthermore, real esports players have joined the fray. Standing out and winning the prizes has become far more difficult than we imagined.

Pump.fun is already the world's largest 24-hour online esports platform.

"Next Generation Trading"

This is a new term coined in the English-speaking world for Meme coin exchanges: "New Gen Trading." This name reflects a current trend in Meme coin trading—younger players, more aggressive trading, and more frequent and rapid transactions.

Compared to the term "PvP," which is still more widely used in the Chinese-speaking world, "new generation trading" sounds more appealing, but it cannot conceal the brutal competition behind it—in order to capture the latest hot topics, one needs to be armed to the teeth, sell when prices are high, and never harbor any illusions.

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.

This month's statistics on pump.fun users' trading activity show that approximately 47.5% of users incurred losses, and about 49.7% only realized profits of less than $500. If you can realize profits of over $500, you're already among the top 1.36% in the market.

But the endless stream of Meme Coin users are all aiming to earn a fortune that could change their lives. If that fortune is defined as $50,000 or more, then you need to outperform 99.6% of the other people.

How difficult is it to beat 99.6% of people? Let's take a look at the perspective of @clukz, a top trader who has recently gone viral. His career has already generated profits of approximately $2 million.

To make money, you need to be as fast as the wind.

First, a tweet from Solana co-founders, retweeting the official White House X tweet, appeared in his X feed. The tweet sent by toly only contained one image.

What did toly want to express? It doesn't matter. In the video, clukz muttered to himself, "What is this?", and then immediately Googled the image, discovering that the image sent by toly corresponds to the character "Lrrr".

It took him only 7 seconds from seeing the tweet to finding the correct result.

By this time, his token monitoring stream had already shown several new tokens issued using this image. Finding the correct answer is fundamental to winning the game. The time taken determines the maximum amount you can win.

From the moment he got the correct answer to his first purchase, the entire process of searching the ticker and making the purchase took only 4 seconds. This allowed him to acquire approximately 19% of the tokens when the token's market value was only $4,000.

Three seconds after the successful purchase, the coin's market value reached $26,000, a fourfold increase. clukz then initiated his first sale, and within the next three minutes, sold off all his holdings in batches.

Ultimately, he made a profit of $3,000 on that token in just over three minutes.

Next is a token from a tweet by pump.fun. He noticed the recurring keyword "early" in the tweet:

From the moment the tweet appeared until he typed "early" to search for the relevant token, he only had 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 sudden, trending tweets, it's crucial that the name contains the complete content of the original tweet.

Once the token that met his requirements appeared, he clicked "buy" in less than a second. He placed two buy orders for 10 SOL each, but the average market value of the two orders differed significantly, at $5,500 and $18,000 respectively.

Two seconds after buying, he began selling, clearing out his entire position within three minutes. He realized a profit of approximately $8,400 on that token.

What followed was the most outrageous scene. He saw that Dogecoin's official Twitter account had changed its profile picture, while he was still playing Fortnite:

He immediately switched out of the game, and before he could even search for possible tickers, the new tokens popped up in the monitoring screen, so he decisively bought them. This action, from switching the game screen to making the purchase, took only 2 seconds. After abandoning a Fortnite game to joining a Meme Coin game, he kept selling and made another $5,000.

The sudden news rendered the original narrative invalid, and many players might have simply resigned themselves to their fate due to lack of time to react. But clukz demonstrated the reaction speed of a top player; there was no luck involved, only quick reflexes and speed.

First, the founder of "Lobster" quoted a tweet about "Lobster on Wall Street," and he immediately selected $LOBSTER based on the tweet's keywords and bought it.

Then, the founder of "Lobster" replied with a new name, "bullclaw." He decisively pressed the 100% sell button, resulting in a large bearish candlestick.

Then, within two seconds, he bought $bullclaw. Ultimately, he made about $1,000 on the wrong "lobster" and about $6,700 on the right "lobster".

Strong people don't distinguish between Chinese and English; clukz isn't just good at Solana.

Let's first look at his use of gmgn to instantly capture Binance's Muyu (a Chinese tech forum). First, his tweet feed showed a tweet from Binance's Chinese official Twitter account announcing the latest merchandise, and upon seeing it, he subconsciously asked, "What's this?"

Among the new merchandise released by Binance's official Chinese Twitter account, the most memorable is a wooden fish motif. In the video, clukz didn't explain his interpretation of the motif's narrative. However, when he switched back to GMGN and the wooden fish appeared in the new token lineup, he immediately bought it, and GMGN swiftly facilitated the purchase.

When trading BSC tokens, clukz's preferred trading instrument is gmgn. He buys Binance Muyu tokens with lightning speed; the moment the notification pops up, he clicks "buy" and succeeds. Unless the video is played in slow motion, it's almost impossible to see him click the "buy" button.

As a foreigner, clukz might not understand the reference to the wooden fish, but his actions demonstrated his extremely fast reaction speed and clear strategy—I may not know the reference to the wooden fish, but I can just wait on gmgn for Chinese people who understand the reference to post related new coins in videos.

Another coin he quickly profited from in the video came from a misspelling of "futiure" in He Yi's tweet. The moment he saw the tweet, he immediately switched to GMGN. At this point, it can be seen that both the new deployment tokens and the soon-to-graduate tokens in GMGN included futiure-related tokens, with only a 5-second difference in deployment time. He chose the one about to graduate. This illustrates that sometimes top players aren't just pulling strings; their speed is simply incredible.

Compared to the previous example of "early," he didn't seem to care whether the tweet title contained the complete tweet when he bought this token. Although he didn't explain it in the video, it's reasonable to infer that he was aware of the "misspelling" themes that had appeared on BSC.

When a foreigner can play BSC faster than a Chinese player and understands Chinese themes, the difficulty of this game can only be described as hellish.

Meme trading is becoming "esports-oriented".

clukz is indeed a former Fortnite pro player.

Between 2021 and 2025, he played for seven different teams. As a former Fortnite pro player, his career was not particularly successful, with total prize money totaling only $5,630. He participated in S-level regional tournaments, but his best result was only 24th place. He also never won a championship in numerous smaller weekly tournaments, with his best result being third place.

In 2025, during his last two S-level regional tournaments, a total of six players (three from each team) won, earning tickets to the World Finals. The combined career prize money of these six players amounted to just over $900,000.

In late April 2025, clukz began a frenzied daily meme currency printing spree, never losing money each week. To his rivals who had defeated him in August 2025, he might have seemed insignificant. But in just one year, he earned far more dollars than his rivals had accumulated over five years or more in their Fortnite careers.

Bringing his talent to Memecoin completely transformed clukz's career. And clukz isn't the only former esports professional to do this; other top traders in the industry, such as @orangie and @meggafaze, also have experience as Fortnite professional players.

The "e-sportsification" of meme trading doesn't narrowly refer to e-sports players joining the meme speculation arena. Rather, it means that the desire to make money through meme trading inherently creates a barrier to entry similar to e-sports. Just like playing FPS games, players need good monitors, mice, keyboards, headphones, and sound cards, and they repeatedly adjust these devices until they allow them to perform at their best in the game.

At the very least, to win in the Meme Coin competition and reap profits, you need a sufficiently smooth desktop computer and a fast enough internet connection. It's like ensuring the game runs smoothly and the connection latency is low. Otherwise, you'll be at a disadvantage from the very beginning.

The "Minimum Requirements for Beating Dogs" as given by the founder of GMGN

After catching up with the "arms race" in hardware and networking, what players need to continue honing is the "esports player skill" like clukz:

- You need to sit in front of the computer intensively every day, watching the latest updates from the Twitter accounts you follow. Clukz said he sits in front of the computer for 16 hours a day.

- You need to develop a keen sense for relating these dynamics to Meme Coin; top players only have a few seconds to react.

You can't hesitate; you need to make quick decisions. clukz said, "Positioning isn't that important; in the first 10-20 seconds, everyone's racing to be the fastest; nobody cares about position distribution."

You need to ruthlessly sell off the chips you've acquired at low prices, without harboring any illusions of getting rich quick with a diamond hand.

When facing failure, you need to have the unwavering determination to win. Even someone as strong as clukz says his videos are just highlight reels. Making money isn't easy; 80% of the time he still gets trapped, squeezed, screwed over by developers, or buys the wrong coins.

For a complete beginner, you also need to learn how to use trading and tweet monitoring tools, and familiarize yourself with the culture and logic behind the explosive growth in this game...

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

Conclusion

As veterans in the cryptocurrency world, we still tend to interpret the current market using our past understanding of meme coins. This is why, in this challenging market, there are many voices claiming that "pump.fun/meme coins have ruined cryptocurrency."

But the speculative game never stops. Young people new to the cryptocurrency world see only this brutal market. To them, Memecoin remains a potential life-changing opportunity, but it's no longer a game of creativity, a contest of who's coolest or whose community is most cohesive; it's a brutal, cutthroat battle.

In the latest poll initiated by the official pump.fun Twitter account, "community belief" still won by an overwhelming margin. Everyone misses the days when it was fun and simple, and you could sleep soundly with your meme coins.

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