Trenches meaning in crypto: the front line of memecoin trading, with the numbers

What the word names, how a launchpad token is born, the launchpad era in three dated phases, five invented trades with the fees counted, and what on-chain counts say about winners and losers.

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Hardware wallet app screen composed in Flexdger Wallet: a portfolio named Quarry, a total balance and its change for the day above a row of Transfer, Swap and Buy buttons, the list of holdings with each amount and its move for the day, in a dark theme with a lavender accent.
Composed in Flexdger Wallet. Every figure on it was typed in; nothing is held, sent or received, and no chain is read.

What the word names

Picture a screen that refreshes every few seconds with another token that did not exist a moment ago. Each has a name, a logo made in a minute and a price set by a formula. The people watching that screen, buying some of those tokens and dumping most within the hour, say they are "in the trenches". The trenches are the market for memecoins at the very start of their lives, and the word refers to a place before it refers to a strategy.

The dividing line is age and setting. Someone buying bitcoin is not in the trenches. Someone buying a token that is four minutes old, with no website and a few hundred holders, on a launchpad such as Pump.fun, is. Those people call themselves trenchers.

The press has adopted the term without a gloss. In March 2025, Decrypt wrote that two fast-rising tokens had "breathed life into the meme coin trenches" after a stretch of falling prices. What follows explains how the place works, dates its history, runs five imaginary trades with the fees counted, and sets out what on-chain analysts have measured about who comes out ahead.

Where it comes from

The source is trench warfare, filtered through everyday English, in which "in the trenches" means doing hard, thankless work at the front. Wiktionary lists two figurative senses of the plural: the front line of any field, and a low point or difficult situation. Crypto keeps both on purpose. The first minutes of a token are the front line, where prices move fastest. And they are also where most people lose, hence the mix of pride and self-mockery in the way the word is said. A typical post: "Three weeks in the trenches. Up on one coin, down on the other forty."

The word family

Words used inside the trenches (cabal, bundled, bonded, dev sold, CTO) are covered in memecoin slang decoded, which links each term to the on-chain event behind it. The wider vocabulary of crypto on X lives in the Crypto Twitter slang glossary.

How a token is born on a launchpad

Memecoins existed long before the word. What made the trenches a daily market was a launchpad: a site where anyone can create a token in a few steps and have it on sale at once. Its price comes from a bonding curve, a formula that raises the price with every buy and lowers it with every sell. When enough has been bought, the token "graduates" to a regular exchange pool.

Trading it then follows a routine. Most people use a terminal or a Telegram bot instead of the launchpad's own page, and pay a fee going in and another coming out (the worked trades further down add them up). Two terms are worth knowing before a first purchase: the CA, or contract address, which picks out one exact token among copies of its name, and exit liquidity, the later buyers that early holders sell into.

And the people involved are not only traders. At least six groups take part in a launch, and several are paid whether or not the token lives.

The label "degen" is the broader name for a similar trader, with a longer past in betting and decentralized finance (what degen means, and where it came from). One distinction matters more than any label: wallets are not people. Analysts count addresses, and a single trader can run dozens, so every count on this page is a count of wallets.

The launchpad era in three phases

Each date below comes from the outlet named beside it.

2022 to 2024: the idea, and a first leader

2025: competition and a shrinking win rate

Late 2025 and 2026: fees move to creators, leaders keep changing

Two patterns stand out. First, leadership rotates: SunPump in August 2024, LetsBonk in July 2025 and Four.meme in October 2025 each passed Pump.fun for a while. Second, more of the fees have been routed to creators, which helps to explain why so many tokens get launched.

Five invented trades, fees included

An illustration with made-up numbers; the mechanics are real. The fee is the rate on Pump.fun's published fee page, 1.25% on the way in and again on the way out, and the holder percentages a trader checks are the filters that terminals such as Axiom list in their documentation.

The setup: a trader sets aside 1 SOL for the evening and splits it into five stakes of 0.2 SOL. Before each buy she checks the creator's share of supply, the top ten wallets, the share held in bundle wallets and the share taken by snipers. For scale, new tokens arrive at a rate of one every few seconds: on July 6, 2025, 28,869 were created across LetsBonk and Pump.fun in 24 hours, roughly one every three seconds.

TradeExit price, as a multiple of entryReturned after fees (SOL)
A: rides a rally, sold on the way up3.00.585
B: treads water, sold for a small gain1.10.215
C: creator sells, the price slides0.40.078
D: stalls and fades0.10.020
E: dead in minutes0.050.010
Total0.907, against 1.000 staked: minus 9.3%

Trade A is a big win: price alone up 200%, a figure that would look great on a card. The account still ended the evening down 9.3%. That distance between one trade on a screenshot and the account behind it is the subject of what a crypto PnL card shows.

The fees put a floor under everything. Paying 1.25% in and 1.25% out costs about 2.5% of a stake, so a token must rise about 2.55% merely to break even, before network fees and priority tips.

Counting the winners

Few people make money in the trenches, and fewer as the bar rises. These counts come from on-chain analyses with published methods, and memecoin millionaires, by the on-chain numbers lines them up together with their caveats.

Two cautions cover all of it. CoinGecko measures only realized profit and loss, so someone still holding a collapsed token shows no loss, which flatters the figures. And since every number counts wallets, not people, the distortion could go in either direction.

Where it goes wrong

Price is the obvious risk. The others come with the way new tokens are launched, and each leaves a trail on-chain.

Custody and fees

A lot of Telegram bots keep the private key of the wallet they trade from. Solareum users had exported keys from other bots and imported them; in April 2024 it closed after more than 300 of them lost about $523,000 in SOL, as Decrypt reported. A key or seed phrase pasted into a bot is a key anyone with access to the bot can use. Fees are the quieter loss: 1.25% each way on the curve, plus network fees and the priority tips that buy a place in a crowded block.

Rugs and soft rugs

In a classic rug pull, whoever supplied a token's liquidity takes it back. Chainalysis uses a precise test: an address that added liquidity and later removed at least 65% of it, worth $1,000 or more, from a pool that had gained traction and then stopped trading. By that test, about 94% of the pools linked to suspected pump-and-dump tokens launched in 2024 (69,897 of 74,312) looked rugged by the address that made them.

On a launchpad that move is unavailable. Pump.fun's documentation says the pool a token graduates into belongs to the protocol, which neither seeds nor removes it afterward. The rug becomes a sale: insiders buy cheaply at the bottom of the curve and sell into later buyers, as crypto.news describes it. A soft rug is the slow variant, a team winding down and selling over days or weeks, in the Ledger Academy glossary's wording. Solidus Labs found soft-rug traits in about 93% of the 388,000 Raydium pools it examined.

Bundles

A bundled launch spreads the creator's own buying across many wallets in the first block, so one holder looks like many. On Solana it can be done in one move: Jito, a block-building service, accepts bundles of up to five transactions that execute in order, in the same slot, all or nothing. The check is the holder list at launch: several fresh wallets, funded from the same source, buying at the same instant.

Snipers

A sniper buys in the first seconds, nearly always with a bot. Pine Analytics found in April 2025 that over half of new Pump.fun tokens were sniped in their creation block. For the subset funded directly by the token's creator, more than 4,600 sniper wallets working with over 10,400 creators took more than 15,000 SOL of profit in a month, and over 55% of those snipes were sold within a minute. Whoever buys after them is their exit.

No investor protection

In February 2025, the staff of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission said that a typical meme coin is not a security, so buyers do not get the protections of the federal securities laws. Fraud around meme coins can still be pursued under other federal and state laws.

Why trench wins travel as screenshots

Most people meet the trenches through the winners: a profit card with a four-digit percentage, a wallet with a round total. Neither proves much without an address. One trade says nothing about the forty around it, as the five trades above show, and a screen can be composed. Five tells in a wallet screenshot lists what gives a composed one away.

Composed screens have honest uses too, in skits and explainers about this very culture. Flexdger Wallet is a mockup of a crypto wallet app built for that: every quantity is typed in, nothing is held, and our terms of use forbid presenting a screen as a real balance. We recommend a visible Mockup label in every clip.

Sources

Questions

What is a trencher?

A trencher is someone who regularly buys and sells newly launched memecoins, usually through a trading terminal or a Telegram bot. Degen is the older and wider word for a similar person, with roots in betting and decentralized finance.

What does one trade cost on Pump.fun?

The fee on the bonding curve is 1.25% each way. Buy and sell once and about 2.5% of the stake is gone, so the price has to climb roughly 2.55% before you break even. Network fees and the priority tips that win a place in a crowded block are extra.

How many launchpad tokens survive?

Very few. Solidus Labs followed more than 7 million Pump.fun tokens with at least five trades, created between January 2024 and March 2025. About 97,000 still had more than $1,000 of liquidity, which leaves 98.6% below that line. Tokens that had already moved to Raydium were not part of that count.

Are Telegram trading bots safe?

Many of them hold the private key of the wallet they trade from, so you are trusting the operator completely. In April 2024, Solareum shut down after more than 300 users who had imported keys from other bots lost about $523,000 in SOL, according to Decrypt. Never paste a key or seed phrase into a tool you have not vetted.

Does securities law protect meme coin buyers?

Generally not. In February 2025 the staff of the U.S. SEC said a typical meme coin is not a security, so buyers lack the protections of the federal securities laws. Other federal and state laws can still reach fraud involving them. None of this is investment advice.

What is the difference between a rug and a soft rug?

A classic rug is a sudden removal of a pool of liquidity. A soft rug is slow: a team winds down and sells off over days or weeks. On a launchpad the pool is owned by the protocol, so the usual rug is insiders selling into later buyers rather than pulling liquidity.

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