A top esports professional player is usually insane in these aspects - reaction time, hand-eye coordination, multitasking ability, game strategy and awareness, mental resilience, focus, and endurance.

For example, the peak of League of Legends, Faker, has an exaggerated 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 operates his own hero but also frequently switches the game screen to other areas of the map to gather information and make strategic decisions. His countless highlight reels of precise micro-operations to the millisecond level are remarkable. Starting in 2018, he fell into a slump due to aging, but he was able to return to the top of the world again with a strong mentality.

Meme Coin, in the past usually seen as a game of creativity and narrative imagination. But now, this game has undergone a complete transformation - it has become a global frenzy-catching competition. The top players in this game are approaching the level of esports players. Furthermore, real esports players have also joined this game. To stand out in this game, win prizes, the difficulty has far exceeded our imagination.

Pump.fun has become the world's largest 24-hour online esports platform.

「New Gen Trading」

This is a new term created by the English community for meme coin exchanges, "New Gen Trading." This name reflects a new trend in meme coin trading - younger players, aggressive, frequent, and rapid trading.

Compared to the term "PvP" still more widely used in our Chinese community, "New Gen Trading" sounds better, but it cannot conceal the brutal competition behind it - armed to the teeth to capture the latest hotspots, sell high, and never harbor any illusions.

58 seconds, this is the average holding time of Solana blockchain meme coins currently. Three years ago, the average holding time was as long as 1 day.

In the transaction statistics of pump.fun users this month, about 47.5% of users are at a loss, about 49.7% of users have realized profits of no more than $500. If you can cash out profits of more than $500, you are already in the top 1.36% of the market.

However, the successive meme coin players are all aiming for life-changing money. If the standard 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 people? Let's review the recent hotshot trader @clukz's perspective. His career has realized profits totaling around $2 million.

To Make Money, You Need to Be Swift as the Wind

First, a tweet from Solana's co-founder retweeting the White House's tweet appeared in his X Push information feed, with the tweet sent by toly containing only an image.

What was toly trying to convey? It doesn't matter. clukz mumbled "What is this?" in the video, then immediately searched Google for the image, discovering that the image sent by toly corresponds to a character named "Lrrr".

From seeing this tweet to finding the correct result, it took only 7 seconds.

By this time, his token monitoring feed had already detected many new tokens using this image to promote. Finding the correct answer is the basis of winning this game. And how long it takes determines the upper limit of how much you can win:

And from getting the correct answer to his first buy-in, from searching the ticker to the purchase process, it only took 4 seconds, allowing him to acquire about 19% of the chips when the coin was only valued at $4000.

3 seconds after a successful purchase, the coin's market cap reached $260 million, quadrupling. clukz started the first sell-off at this point and sold off all the chips in batches over the next 3 minutes.

In the end, on this token, in just over 3 minutes, he reaped a $3000 profit.

Next was a token from a pump.fun tweet. He captured the key word "early" that appeared repeatedly in the tweet:

From the appearance of this tweet to his entry of 'early' to search for the relevant token, it took him only 2 seconds to react.

He did not act immediately, but waited until a token with an image, name, and ticker that matched the original tweet the most appeared before making a move to buy. According to him, this instantaneous tweet hot topic, where the name aligns with the full tweet content, is crucial:

After this token that met his criteria appeared, he clicked to buy in less than 1 second. He placed two purchases of 10 SOL each, but the average market value of the two purchases differed significantly, being $5500 and $18000, respectively.

Two seconds after the purchase was complete, he started to sell, and within 3 minutes, he liquidated his entire position. He realized around $8400 in profit on that token.

Then came the most exaggerated scene. He saw that Dogecoin's official tweet had changed its avatar, and at that moment, he was still playing Fortnite:

He immediately exited the game, even before being able to search for possible tickers, a new token appeared in the monitoring tool, so he decisively bought in. The action from cutting off the game screen to the purchase took only 2 seconds. From abandoning a Fortnite game to joining a meme coin game, he kept selling, and earned another $5000.

A sudden news update rendered the original narrative no longer valid, and many players may have resigned themselves to bad luck due to not reacting in time. But clukz demonstrated the top player's responsiveness, relying not on luck but on reaction speed and agility.

First, the 'Lobster' founder referenced a tweet 'Wall Street has Lobster,' and he immediately selected $LOBSTER based on the tweet keywords and bought in:

Next, the 'Lobster' founder replied with a new name 'bullclaw.' He promptly hit the 100% sell button, causing a large bearish candle:

Then, within another 2 seconds, he bought $bullclaw. In the end, he made about $1000 on the wrong 'Lobster' and around $6700 on the correct 'Lobster'.

The strong do not differentiate between Chinese and English, and clukz is not just a fish in water on Solana. In the video, he quickly bought the "futiure" from a tweet by He Yi and the Binance-themed "Binance Wooden Fish," demonstrating a deep understanding of Chinese meme culture.

When a foreigner can outpace even us Chinese on BSC, the difficulty of this game can truly be described as hellish.

Meme Trading Goes "Esports"

clukz is truly a former Fortnite professional 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 earnings amounting to only $5,630. He participated in regional S-tier events, with his best placement being 24th. In many small weekly tournaments, he never achieved first place, with his best result being third.

In 2025, during his last two regional S-tier events, a total of 6 players (3 per team) qualified for the World Finals. The total career earnings of these 6 players amounted to just over $900,000.

In late April 2025, clukz embarked on a frenzy of daily meme coin minting, never ending a week in the red. By August 2025, he had surpassed opponents who once defeated him, making him seem insignificant at the time. In just a year, he earned much more in USD than these opponents did in their 5+ years of Fortnite professional careers.

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

The "esportsification" of meme coin trading does not narrowly refer to esports players joining the meme speculation camp, but rather aims to make money trading meme coins, thereby establishing a threshold similar to esports. Just as in FPS gaming, where players need a good monitor, mouse, keyboard, headset, and sound card, and fine-tune these devices repeatedly until they can perform at their best in the game.

At the very least, to win over others and profit in the meme coin race, you need a smooth enough desktop computer and fast enough internet speed. Just like ensuring your game runs smoothly and has low latency to the game server. Otherwise, you'll lose right at the starting line of the race.

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

- You need to sit intensely in front of your computer every day, focusing on the latest updates from key Twitter accounts. clukz mentioned he sits in front of the computer for 16 hours a day.

- You need to practice linking these updates to the sharp sense of smell for meme coins. Top players' reaction times are only a few seconds.

- You can't hesitate; you need to make quick decisions. clukz said, "Timing isn't that important; everyone is trying to be faster in the first 10 - 20 seconds, and no one cares about the distribution of holdings."

- You need to ruthlessly sell the chips you bought at a low price all the way through, never holding onto any fantasy of diamond hands getting rich quick.

- Faced with failure, you need to have the determination to believe you will win. Even someone as strong as clukz admits the videos he releases are highlights of his successful moves. Making money isn't easy; he still gets trapped, clipped, hit by dev, or buys the wrong coin 80% of the time.

For a complete newbie, you also need to learn to use trading and tweet monitoring tools, understand the culture and logic behind the surges in this game...

This is a brutal competition. Your gains and losses will be snatched from the hands of countless traders behind the screens.

Conclusion

As veterans of the crypto world, we are still accustomed to interpreting the current market through our past understanding of meme coins. It is for this reason that in the grueling market, there are many voices saying "pump.fun/meme coins have ruined cryptocurrency."

But the speculative game never stops. For the young newcomers to the crypto world, this is the brutal market they see. In their eyes, meme coins are still a hope that could quickly change their lives, except it's no longer a creativity game about who's cooler and whether the community is more cohesive, but a ruthless, cut-throat battle.

In the latest poll initiated by the pump.fun official Twitter account, "Community Sentiment" still won by an overwhelming margin. Everyone misses the past era when it was fun and simple, and you could sleep soundly holding meme coins.

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