Tron memecoins after SunPump: what is left

Tron's memecoin market has collapsed. SunPump, the launchpad that defined it, took $5.31M in gross revenue in Q3 2024, $33.29K in Q2 2026, and $882 in the 24 hours to 31 August 2026 — a decline of roughly 99.5% (DefiLlama). Tron itself is unaffected: it remains the #5 chain at $5.155B TVL.

Almost every page that ranks for this query was written in late 2024, when SunPump was three months old and the numbers pointed the other way. Nothing about them has been updated since. This page starts from the current data instead.

SunPump's revenue, quarter by quarter

The fee series is the whole argument, so here it is without commentary attached.

Source: DefiLlama, read 31 August 2026.

A launchpad's revenue is the cleanest vital sign it has, because it is downstream of everything else — launches, trading, graduations, whether anyone is still building bots against it. A venue can keep a homepage online and a Telegram channel active indefinitely. It cannot fake fees, and $882 in a day is not a business. Treat the 24-hour figure as soft in isolation — DefiLlama's daily numbers lag on some protocols — but the quarterly series behind it is not noise.

For context on how ordinary this is: the pattern of a launchpad going from category-defining to commercially finished inside two years has now happened repeatedly, and the mechanics are covered in dead and dying memecoin launchpads.

Tron is not dying. Its memecoin layer is.

This distinction is the thing most coverage gets wrong in both directions — either treating SunPump's decline as a Tron story, or treating Tron's continued size as evidence that its memecoin scene is healthy.

As of 31 August 2026, Tron is the fifth-largest chain by total value locked at $5.155B, with a retail user base that is among the largest in crypto. That base is built overwhelmingly on stablecoin transfer volume, not on speculative token issuance. Tron is a payments rail that also happens to have smart contracts. Its dominance in one activity never translated into dominance in the other, and there is no mechanical reason it should have.

So the honest framing is narrow: a very large chain with a memecoin venue that stopped working. If you are asking "should I be on Tron for memecoins," the answer is that the liquidity, the tooling and the launch flow are all somewhere else — mostly Solana, with Robinhood Chain second and BNB Chain a distant third. The comparison across chains is set out in which chain is best for trading memecoins.

Why every result you find says the opposite

Search "tron memecoins" and you get two kinds of page. The first is an exchange academy — KuCoin, Gate, BingX — which exists to convert readers into accounts and has no editorial reason to tell you a category is finished. The second is a content farm recycling 2024 launch coverage, where SunPump was new, revenue was climbing, and "the pump.fun of Tron" was a reasonable thing to write.

Neither category updates. An academy page written in September 2024 that still ranks in August 2026 is not lying about the past; it is describing a market that no longer exists and carrying no date that would tell you so. This is the general failure mode of memecoin content, and it is why every figure on this site carries the date it was read.

What SunPump actually was, and what we will not claim about it now

SunPump launched in 2024 as Tron's bonding-curve launchpad, following the model pump.fun established: a token is minted against a bonding curve, buyers trade against that curve rather than a liquidity pool, and once enough has been raised the token migrates to a DEX. If the mechanism is unfamiliar, how bonding-curve pricing actually works explains it properly.

What we are not going to do is print SunPump's current creation fee, trading fee or graduation threshold. Those numbers circulate widely in 2024-era articles, we could not verify from reachable documentation that any of them still apply as of 31 August 2026, and a stale fee published confidently is worse than no fee at all. If you need them, read them off the venue's own interface immediately before you transact, not off an article — this one included.

The same applies to graduation statistics. Nobody publishes a defensible SunPump graduation rate, and the ones you will find quoted for other venues vary by an order of magnitude depending on the measurement window used. Why that dispersion exists, and why most launched tokens end at zero regardless of chain, is in why most memecoins go to zero.

If you are trading on Tron anyway

Some readers will have a Tron position, a Tron wallet, or a specific token on Tron they want to reach. The shape of that, in prose rather than as a procedure:

Tron uses its own address format and token standard — addresses begin with T, and fungible tokens are TRC-20, not ERC-20. An EVM wallet like MetaMask does not connect to Tron; you need a Tron-native wallet. Fees work differently too: rather than paying a gas price in the native asset for every transaction, Tron accounts consume bandwidth and energy, with a small free daily bandwidth allowance and energy obtained either by staking TRX or by burning it at transaction time. The practical consequence is that transaction cost depends on your staked position, not just on network congestion, and two users can pay very different amounts for identical transactions. Read the estimated cost in your wallet before signing rather than trusting any published figure.

The bigger practical problem is tooling. Much of the safety infrastructure this site covers is chain-specific — RugCheck is Solana-only, and EVM-focused security scanners do not automatically cover Tron. Before you rely on any scanner, honeypot checker or holder-distribution tool for a Tron token, confirm that it actually supports the chain rather than silently returning an empty result. Reading a contract yourself is more portable than any of them, and how to verify a token contract yourself covers the checks that transfer across chains.

For monitoring positions on chains that specialised memecoin tooling ignores, a general portfolio tracker such as The Crypto App will usually cover the major Tron assets even where a memecoin screener does not.

What this doesn't tell you

The DefiLlama series measures SunPump's own contracts. It does not measure trading in tokens SunPump launched that have since migrated to a DEX, and it does not measure any Tron memecoin activity happening outside that venue. Those are separate facts, and a venue can be finished for issuance while tokens it produced continue to trade.

We also have not surveyed Tron for a successor launchpad. No Tron venue appears in DefiLlama's top 25 launchpads by fees as of 31 August 2026, which is meaningful but not conclusive — indexing coverage is incomplete, particularly for smaller and non-English-language products. Absence from a fee table is an inference about size, not a finding of non-existence.

Tron is not indexed in the Meme Central feed. The feed covers Solana, Base, BNB Chain, Robinhood Chain and Monad venues. Per-venue launch, graduation and volume data on the analytics hub reflects those chains only, and describing that data as whole-market would be wrong for exactly the reason this article exists. If you want current Tron activity, go to a Tron-native explorer or DEX interface, not to us.

Finally, nothing here says Tron memecoin activity cannot recover. A chain with that much retail throughput has the raw ingredients. It says only that as of 31 August 2026 the revenue is not there, and that anyone telling you otherwise is probably citing a 2024 article.

Frequently asked questions

Is SunPump dead?

Commercially, effectively yes. SunPump's gross revenue fell from $5.31M in Q3 2024 to $33.29K in Q2 2026 and $882 in the 24 hours to 31 August 2026, roughly a 99.5% decline (DefiLlama). We have not confirmed a formal shutdown announcement and are not asserting one — the distinction between "technically live" and "commercially finished" matters, and SunPump is in the second category.

Are there still memecoins on Tron?

Yes, tokens launched on Tron still exist and still trade. What has gone is the issuance engine and the depth around it. No Tron launchpad appeared in DefiLlama's top 25 by fees as of 31 August 2026, and the tooling ecosystem — screeners, safety scanners, trading terminals — has largely not followed the chain.

How do you buy a memecoin on Tron?

You need a Tron-native wallet, since EVM wallets do not connect to the chain, plus TRX to cover bandwidth and energy. From there it is a swap on a Tron DEX using the token's verified contract address. We are deliberately not publishing a step-by-step: venue availability on Tron has changed materially since 2024 and a procedure written today may be stale within a quarter.

Why is Tron still ranked #5 by TVL if its memecoin scene collapsed?

Because Tron's value sits in stablecoin transfer volume rather than speculative token issuance. The $5.155B TVL figure (31 August 2026) reflects a payments rail with a very large retail base. Size in one activity never implied depth in the other, and the two moved in opposite directions.

Is Tron cheaper than Solana for memecoin trading?

Not comparable in the way people expect. Tron charges through bandwidth and energy, which depend partly on how much TRX you have staked, so identical transactions can cost different users different amounts. Cost is also the wrong variable when the underlying market has almost no depth — a cheap transaction into an illiquid pool is not a saving.

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Lock your liquidity before you ask anyone to trust it

If you are launching rather than trading, the one commitment a buyer can verify without trusting you is an on-chain lock on your liquidity. Team Finance's LP time-locks — built by TrustSwap, which also builds Meme Central — hold LP tokens for a fixed term on Ethereum, Robinhood Chain, Polygon, Base and BNB, and the lock surfaces as a verified badge on that token's page in the Meme Central feed. Two honest limits apply here specifically: Tron is not among the supported chains, and a lock never stops a developer selling their own allocation.

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Nothing here is financial, legal or tax advice. Memecoins are extremely high-risk: most lose most of their value, and the majority of tokens launched never reach a decentralised exchange at all. Never spend money you cannot afford to lose entirely. Meme Central does not recommend any specific token. Data described as Meme Central's own reflects tokens indexed by Meme Central and is not whole-market data.