ASTEROID Pumped 10,000x in Three Days, Is Meme Season Back on Ethereum?

Elon Musk once again lit up the meme coin market, bringing to the community a "Astro Doge" that surged nearly 10,000 times in just 3 days—$ASTEROID.

However, while this "Astro Doge" set off a frenzy in the ETH mainnet market, it also caused anxiety in the SOL trenches...

Space Dog $ASTEROID

ASTEROID was originally designed as a zero-gravity indicator for the 2024 SpaceX Polaris Dawn mission. It was turned into a plush toy that flew to space with astronauts, floating inside the cabin to indicate the onset of weightlessness.

Although ASTEROID is not a real dog, it can be said that it is the first "Shiba Inu" to enter space.

Liv Perrotto, the creator of ASTEROID, was a little girl herself. She hoped that ASTEROID would inspire all children to bravely pursue their dreams, saying, "Look, even a little Shiba Inu has entered space. When I grow up, I can definitely do it too." However, after battling bone cancer for 5 years, she tragically passed away on January 14 of this year.

Liv's biggest dream during her lifetime was to meet Musk. She even made a list of questions, preparing to get answers when she met Musk. After Liv's passing, her mother, Rebecca Perrotto, revealed the handwritten list of questions:

The final question on this list was, "Can you make ASTEROID SpaceX's mascot?"

On April 17, Musk replied to a tweet mentioning this by @glennbeck, saying, "Will answer later."

On April 19, Musk answered all the questions on the list, and regarding the question "Can you make ASTEROID SpaceX's mascot?" Musk's response was, "OK."

A typical Muskian narrative, with a grand vision—SpaceX's new mascot. But this time, the wealth effect did not occur on SOL, but rather on the ETH mainnet.

The $ASTEROID on the ETH mainnet started operating in September 2024, but after March 2025, its official Twitter account also fell into a less active state, with updates occurring roughly every few months. The official website linked in the Twitter bio is also no longer accessible.

They once airdropped 0.5% of the supply to St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital, the same recipient of all proceeds from the sale of the Asteroid Shiba plush toys by creator Liv Perrotto, to support pediatric cancer treatment. However, this was back in 2024.

Creator Liv Perrotto's mother, Rebecca Perrotto, claimed the 485.98 SOL transaction fee income from $ASTEROID on SOL. The token was launched via the Bags platform, and the total transaction fee income has now reached 856.46 SOL.

After receiving the transaction fee income, she did not publicly disclose this action on Twitter or any other social media platform, nor did she express any opinion on meme coins on ETH or SOL. In fact, her only statement regarding cryptocurrency is still somewhat unfriendly:

In response to a tweet about ETH $ASTEROID being listed on Aster, @AJamesMcCarthy stated that profiting from the creative design of a deceased little girl is deplorable. Rebecca Perrotto replied, "This is just so disheartening."

So, with an old and a new $ASTEROID, both have certain advantages from different perspectives. However, it cannot be said that the older one, the coin on the ETH mainnet, ultimately emerged as a "community success" because the CTO team had been inactive for over half a year before encountering this significant opportunity.

But there was something happening that made the SOL trenches anxious.

SOL Gets Drained

Wojak is a classic meme character familiar to meme enthusiasts. The $WOJAK on SOL slowly began to recover at the end of March, gradually rising from a $3 million market cap to a peak of $12 million.

However, all of this came to a halt on April 17 when Musk announced his response to Liv Perrotto's question. From April 17 onwards, $WOJAK on SOL has plummeted over 50%.

In contrast, $WOJAK on ETH surged by about 44% on April 17 and continued to rise over the following days, quickly jumping from a $6 million market cap to briefly hitting a $45 million market cap.

In just one day, the market cap lead of $WOJAK on SOL, which was about 10 times that of $WOJAK on ETH, was rapidly reversed.

The reversal of $WOJAK on SOL is seen as a concerning signal for players in the SOL trenches. Unlike native memes on SOL like $neet or memes with IP on SOL like $troll, both $WOJAK on ETH and SOL lack IP, and their competition is not only seen as a community vitality competition but also signifies a preference in capital allocation. Even though SOL has unaffected native and high-quality meme assets, and even $troll on SOL rose (albeit not as dramatically as $troll on ETH), such coins are few.

Will pump.fun Face Challenges?

Many English-speaking players believe that pump.fun's low-cost coin issuance no longer means "fair launch" but has turned into a race to see who can get 5% or more chips faster and cheaper. People reminisce about the days of buying a 0.x% chip and holding onto a shared dream of reaching a market cap of hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars.

While it is unknown if this sentiment will actually lead to a change in the SOL ecosystem, some launchpads have already attempted to challenge pump.fun using this sentiment.

The launchpad Printr, supported by Bybit, has introduced "Proof of Belief" where devs can enable this mode during coin issuance, distributing creator income to token stakers. Additionally, they can choose to automatically use creator income for buyback and burn or auto-add it to LP.

A trending new token issuance model experiment comes from @xbt2027, dubbed as "D27/D17," with its issuance of the main token $2027 on the ETH mainnet seeing a peak surge of approximately 15x.

Compared to the bonding curve, this model takes a much slower pace to play out and is divided into 5 stages:

- Stage 1: 10% of the total token supply is used for initial fundraising, similar to sending money to a wallet and waiting to receive tokens, but with a 100% refund option.

- Stages 2, 3, 4: Up to 5% of the total token supply is allocated, with the token valuation increasing compared to Stage 1 by 1.21x, 1.44x, and 1.69x, respectively. Refunds are still possible but not at a 100% rate, and the refund percentage for each stage depends on the fundraising status of the previous stage.

- Stage 5: If the fundraising amount does not reach the cap, the unsold tokens allocated in Stages 2, 3, 4 will be carried over to this stage. This stage also has a fixed sales quota of 5% of the total supply, and refunds are not available.

Through the sale, 20% of the tokens are sold across the 5 stages, while another 10% is locked in LP together with 90% of the sale funds. The remaining 10% of the sale funds are used to buy back $2027, and all remaining issued tokens will be burned.

The reason it is called an "experiment" is that this model has not yet been finalized through a smart contract to establish a fixed pattern and automated operation. Currently, there are 2 tokens that have completed fundraising through this experiment, $2027 issued on the ETH mainnet and $XBT, which is set to launch on SOL soon. $XBT has raised a total of 8146.349 SOL and will have its TGE on April 21 at 0:00.

This model is clearly designed to slow down, reward believers (with the highest cost of entry and refund flexibility in Stage 1), and address current issues such as early sniper attacks and poor liquidity in meme coins.

Although it is uncertain whether these new experiments or launchpads can alter the overly PvP nature of the SOL ecosystem, through the actions of these projects, we can sense that the current resentment towards PvP on SOL has grown so strong that project teams believe they can attract users by leveraging emotions to break through. Perhaps, the SOL ecosystem will indeed see some changes. Perhaps, pump.fun is also feeling anxious.