State of the Trenches, 2026-W43: fees −8.4% week over week

Fees and creator earnings

The covered launchpad fee subtotal for 2026-W43 (Oct 19, 2026 to Oct 25, 2026, UTC) was $22.33M across 14 non-overlapping venues, −8.4% against 2026-W42 on the same venues. 5 venues that share a fee stream with another venue are reported individually and never added.^1,2

Creator earnings — fees paid to coin creators and, depending on the venue's own definition, holders, referrers or traders — were $11.15M across 16 venues that define them, −9.5% week over week.^3,4

By share of the subtotal, pump.fun gained the most (+3.5 points) and Flap.sh lost the most (-1.7 points). A share shift says where fees moved, not why.¹¹

Narratives

Trading in the coins of the tracked narratives totalled $506.95M for the week, counting a coin once when it belongs to more than one narrative (the per-narrative totals add up to $529.1M). This is the volume of identified coins across their indexed pools, not of the whole market.^12,13

Perpetual-futures coins carried the most volume among narratives collected during the week: $248.25M (partial: some member-days were not observed). Its week-over-week change is withheld: 0 of 6 members present in both weeks were fully observed in both, below the comparable-basket minimum.^14,15

First observed this week: GTA 6 Dacity Coin coins, Kimchi coins, PHP2Shell coins, AI inference market coins, French protest coins, Pump.fun card-gacha coins. A narrative's first week has no meaningful prior week, so no change is reported for it.^{16,17,18,19,20,21}

Collection paused during the week: Kimchi coins, French protest coins, Flying Tesla Roadster coins, AI influencer characters, Creator fees routed to people. Their members stay members; their totals after the pause are partial, not zero.^{22,23,24,25,26}

• Perpetual-futures coins: $248.25M (partial), 15 members, change withheld.²⁷
• Coins paired with tokenized stocks: $94.71M, 5 members, +42.9% on the comparable basket.²⁸
• GTA 6 Dacity Coin coins: $52.24M (partial), 5 members, first observed this week.²⁹
• Kimchi coins: $31.91M (partial), 7 members, first observed this week.³⁰
• Super Intelligence coins: $22.64M (partial), 24 members, change withheld.³¹
• PHP2Shell coins: $21.19M, 4 members, first observed this week.³²
• AI inference market coins: $12.58M, 3 members, first observed this week.³³
• French protest coins: $7.4M (partial), 3 members, first observed this week.³⁴
• Flying Tesla Roadster coins: $6.08M (partial), 10 members, change withheld.³⁵
• Pump.fun card-gacha coins: $5.17M (partial), 5 members, first observed this week.³⁶
• AI influencer characters: no member-day observed, 5 members, change withheld.³⁷
• Creator fees routed to people: no member-day observed, 7 members, change withheld.³⁸

Breadth

5 of the 17 tracked coins with prices at both ends of the week rose. The five most traded coins accounted for 57.6% of deduplicated narrative volume.^39,40

What to watch

• GSIR solana:GoLpdp…pump (Super Intelligence coins): Last day's volume $319 is under $1,000; a second observation archives it.⁴¹

What cuts against this

• The week-over-week change is withheld for 5 collected narrative(s) because too few members were fully observed in both weeks: Perpetual-futures coins, Super Intelligence coins, Flying Tesla Roadster coins, AI influencer characters, Creator fees routed to people.^{15,42,43,44,45}
• 9 narrative total(s) are partial: some member-days were not observed, so those totals are lower bounds.^{46,47,48,49,50}
• Only 5 of 17 priced coins rose over the week; gains were narrow.^39,51

Edition status: complete (revision 1, method weekly-v1.2.1). fees: pass; runs: pass; financial-anchor: pass.