A top-tier esports professional typically excels in several areas—reaction time, hand-eye coordination, multitasking ability, game strategy and awareness, psychological resilience, concentration, and endurance.

Take the highest peak in League of Legends, Faker, for example; his reaction time is an exaggerated 106 milliseconds, while the average reaction time for an ordinary person is as high as 200 – 220 milliseconds. In the game, he not only controls his own champion but frequently shifts the game view to other areas of the map to gather information and make strategic decisions. His micro-operations are precise to the millisecond level, and despite hitting a low point in 2018 due to aging, he managed to return to the top of the world thanks to his strong mentality.

Meme coins, in the past, were usually seen as games of creativity and narrative imagination. However, today, this game has undergone a complete transformation—it's a competition to capture global enthusiasm. The top players in this game are approaching the level of esports professionals. Even true esports players have joined in this game. To stand out and win prizes in this game, the difficulty has far exceeded our imagination.

Pump.fun is now the largest online esports platform operating 24 hours a day.

“New Generation Trading”

This is a new term created in the English-speaking community for meme coin exchanges, “New Gen Trading.” This name reflects a new trend in meme coin trading—players are getting younger, trading is aggressive, frequent, and rapid.

Compared to the term “PvP,” which is still widely used in our Chinese community, “New Gen Trading” sounds more appealing, but it cannot conceal the brutality behind it—the need to be armed to the teeth to capture the latest hotspots, sell at high points, and harbor no illusions.

58 seconds—that is the current average holding time for meme coins on the Solana chain. Three years ago, the average holding time was a full day.

According to trading statistics for pump.fun users this month, about 47.5% of users are at a loss, and approximately 49.7% of users have realized no more than $500 in profits. If you manage to cash out more than $500 in profit, you are already among the top 1.36% of the market.

However, the meme coin players who come one after another want to make life-changing sums of money. If the benchmark for this big money is $50,000 or more, then you need to outperform 99.6% of people.

How difficult is it to outperform 99.6% of others? Let's review the perspective of the recently popular top trader @clukz. His career has realized profits of about $2 million.

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

First, in his X feed, he saw a tweet shared from Solana’s co-founder that quoted the White House’s official X account, and the tweet from toly only contained an image.

What was toly trying to express? It doesn’t matter. clukz muttered, “What is this?” and immediately searched Google for that image, finding out that the character in the image was named “Lrrr.”

From the moment he saw the tweet to the correct search result, it took him only 7 seconds.

By this time, his token monitoring feed had already shown multiple new tokens using that image. Finding the correct answer is the foundation for winning this game. And how long it takes determines the upper limit of how much you can win:

From the moment he got the correct answer to his first buy, the process from searching the ticker to buying took just 4 seconds, allowing him to buy about 19% of the tokens when the market cap was just $4,000.

Three seconds after the purchase was successful, the market cap of the token rose to $26,000, quadrupling. At this point, clukz began his first sale and sold all his tokens in batches within the next 3 minutes.

In total, he earned a profit of $3,000 from that token in just over 3 minutes.

Next came a token from a tweet on pump.fun. He caught the repeated keyword “early” in the tweet:

From the appearance of this tweet to him inputting “early” to search related tokens, he only took 2 seconds to react.

He did not act immediately but waited until a token with a name, image, and ticker that matched the original tweet most closely appeared before he invested. According to him, having the complete content of the tweet in the token’s name is very important:

Once this token met his criteria, he clicked to buy in under 1 second. He placed two buy orders of 10 SOL each, but the average market caps of the two orders were vastly different—$5,500 and $18,000 respectively.

Two seconds after completing the purchase, he started selling again, clearing out all his holdings within 3 minutes. He realized approximately $8,400 in profit from that token.

Next came the most exaggerated scene. He saw that the official Dogecoin account changed its profile picture, and at this moment he was still playing Fortnite:

He immediately exited the game, and before he could search for possible tickers, new tokens had already popped up in the monitoring feed, so he decisively bought in. This action of switching from the game screen to making a purchase took only 2 seconds. After giving up a Fortnite game to join a meme coin game, he sold and sold, earning $5,000.

News bursts shifted the original narrative, and many players may have considered themselves unfortunate for not being able to react in time. But clukz demonstrated the reflexes of a top player—without luck, it all relied on quickness and speed.

First, the founder of “Lobster” quoted a tweet that said “Lobsters on Wall Street,” and he immediately selected $LOBSTER based on the tweet's keywords and bought in:

Next, the “Lobster” founder replied with a new name “bullclaw.” He decisively hit the 100% sell button, creating a big red candle:

Then, within 2 seconds, he bought $bullclaw. In the end, he made about $1,000 on the wrong “lobster” and around $6,700 on the right “lobster.”

Strong players are no different between Chinese and English; clukz thrives not just on Solana. In the video, he quickly bought the “futiure” from a He Yi tweet and the “Binance Wooden Fish” related to Binance, which requires a deep understanding of the narrative perspective in the Chinese meme circle.

When a foreigner can be faster than our Chinese players on BSC, the difficulty of this game can only be described as hellish.

Meme Trading “Esports-ified”

clukz is truly a former professional Fortnite player.

Between 2021 and 2025, he played for 7 different teams. As a former professional Fortnite player, his career was not deemed successful, with total career earnings amounting to only $5,630. He participated in S-tier regional competitions, but his best result was only 24th place. In a number of small weekly competitions, he never won a championship, with his best result being third place.

In 2025, in his last two S-tier regional competitions, a total of 6 players won championships (3 per team), earning tickets to the world finals. The total earnings of these 6 players combined were just over 900,000 dollars.

At the end of April 2025, clukz embarked on a frenzied daily meme coin minting mode and never reported a loss at the end of each week. In August 2025, he defeated his opponents who at the time saw him as just an insignificant competitor. However, in just one year, he earned more dollars than these opponents had cumulatively earned in their 5-year or longer Fortnite careers.

Bringing his talent to meme coins completely changed clukz's career. And he is not the only former esports professional doing this; other top traders in the community, such as @orangie and @meggafaze, also have backgrounds as Fortnite professional players.

The “esports-ification” of meme coin trading does not narrowly refer to esports players diving into meme speculation, but implies that the bar for making money through meme coin trading has become as high as in esports. Just as in FPS games, players need good monitors, mice, keyboards, headsets, and sound cards, and they must repeatedly adjust these devices until they enable players to achieve their best performance in games.

At the very least, to win over others and gain profits in meme coin contests, you will need a sufficiently smooth desktop computer and a fast enough internet connection. Just as you need to ensure that the game runs smoothly and the connection latency is low; otherwise, you will lose right at the starting line.

The "minimum configuration to play dog" given by the founder of GMGN

After keeping up with the hardware and network "arms race," what awaits players to continue honing their skills is the “esports player capabilities” like clukz:

- You need to sit in front of the computer with high intensity daily, closely watching the latest updates from targeted Twitter accounts; clukz says he sits in front of the computer for 16 hours a day.

- You need to sharpen your keen sense of connecting these updates to meme coins; top players’ reactions only take a few seconds.

- You cannot hesitate; you need to make quick decisions. Clukz said, “Bundling isn't that important; everyone competes on who is faster in the first 10-20 seconds, and no one cares about the distribution of holdings.”

- You need to ruthlessly sell the tokens you bought at a low price, harboring no fantasies of becoming rich with diamond hands.

- When facing failures, you need to have a firm belief that you will win. Even a strong player like clukz admits that the videos he released are complete operation highlights. Making money is not easy; he still faces being stuck, getting trapped, falling for dev scams, or buying the wrong coins 80% of the time.

For a complete novice, you will also need to learn to use trading and tweet monitoring tools and familiarize yourself with the culture and logic leading to price surges in this game...

This is a brutal competition. Your profits and losses must be seized from the hands of countless traders behind screens.

Conclusion

As seasoned players in the crypto space, we still tend to use our past understanding of meme coins to interpret the current market. Because of this, there are many voices in the tough market claiming, “pump.fun/meme coins have ruined crypto.”

But the game of speculation never stops. Young newcomers to the crypto space see such a brutal market. To them, meme coins still represent a glimmer of hope that can quickly change their lives; however, it is no longer a creative game comparing who is cooler or which community is more cohesive, but rather a ruthless, bloodshed battle.

In the latest poll initiated by the pump.fun official account, “community belief” still won with an overwhelming advantage. Everyone reminisces about the past, a fun and simple time when holding meme coins allowed for restful sleep.

But there will always be youth. Whether we like it or not, or how much we miss the past, there will always be newcomers who understand the market in their own way and find a way to survive in this market environment.

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