Trench Tech — Caleb Shack

Beneath the shroud of candle charts lies a complex social layer that controls the majority of volume and attention onchain.

As founders, we tend to treat attention assets (e.g., memecoins) like any other asset, ignoring the existing social layer behind them. But to create venture-scale businesses, we need to build products that service this social layer—the traders, group chats, tastemakers, and cabals where conviction is formed.

Right now, billions in monthly DEX volume runs through memecoins, yet the social coordination behind them happens in fragmented Telegram chats held together by gatekeeping, screenshots, and reputation. The money is onchain, but the coordination is in the trenches.

We need Trench Tech: tools that meet power users where they already operate, embed into their workflows, capture state and identity, and over time become the platform itself.

A brief anthropology of power law volume onchain

In the crypt that is Telegram lies 200 chaotic and disjointed groupchats where the majority of long-tail asset trading happens.

These groups aren't public. They need to stay small because trading is a zero-sum game, so getting in is difficult. Here's what the process looks like:

A group leader posts about opening spots in the chat and tells applicants to DM them or fill out a Google form. In lower-caliber groups, leaders may post a join link and cap it after a certain number of traders join, manufacturing FOMO. Many other non-public chats are formed through friend groups who like to trade.
For high-caliber groups, getting in requires an impressive PnL or Rickbot scanning history. Rickbot is a Telegram bot that scans contract addresses and surfaces token data—it's become the de facto credential system for proving you're not a tourist.
The group leader filters through the best candidates and admits them.

Gaining access to the top social channels with alpha requires a demonstrated edge that new entrants won't achieve on day 1.

Within a group, specialization takes hold:

Some traders are good at front-running the next meta, usually because they have good taste and are terminally online.
Others are experts in wallet analytics—pinpointing alpha wallets and monitoring their flows.
Some specialize in spotting new trading pairs before official announcements, like the initial $TRUMP pair that launched with hundreds of millions of liquidity.
Whales and traders with large X followings are always welcome because they bring large flows.

Churn in these groups is driven by bad actors who don't contribute intel and sell their positions quickly. Top groups have strict moderators and community members who ensure these participants are removed. New spots open. The cycle continues. This is where alpha forms—not on front-page feeds, but in social micro-structures with strong norms, high trust, and fast information flow.

The opportunity

There is a lot of value being left on the table here. In January 2025, Solana DEX volume reached a monthly all-time high of $313 billion, and current trading platforms maintain 100-300k daily active users. Generalized chat apps like Telegram were not built for trading or capturing this orderflow.

Tools like Rickbot and Sectbot embedded themselves in these chats as utility layers—scanning CAs, tracking analytics—but none have made the leap to owning the end user. Telegram trading bots like Bonkbot and Maestro made it easy for users to trade in-app but failed to become the crypt themselves.

The best way to build Trench Tech is to meet the users where they are (in the crypt) with a useful tool that makes trading, group management, or alpha generation easier, and then use it to bootstrap a network. Here’s the playbook:

Start by targeting influential members in these groups, such as group owners or whales, as your initial user base for your tool.
Crucially, the tool should not just read state, but also provide the means to write state to the tooling platform. For example, imagine a reputation system that tracks and displays the performance of coins after each member mentions them. State generation is the core of building a product with network effects.
When network effects are established, switching costs reduce, and you can now migrate these users to your own platform.
Once the core social graph has been migrated, create a system for these cabals to initiate new members—opening up the gates for your platform to grow beyond the initial set of power users.

Products like Fomo and Vector have attempted something like this and reached success, but they are building the social graph from scratch. That is great for new entrants but fails to service the existing social layer of power users. Trench Tech is about understanding the crypt where these users lie and building products that capture them.

The bigger picture

The opportunity is bigger than memecoins. There always has and always will be an inherent social nature to trading, virality, and speculation. We may not be trading memecoins in 10 years, but because blockchains colocate an identity network with financial performance, the lessons will transfer to whatever form social trading takes next. Start where things are working today and build for the future.

Whoever captures the trenches will own the next Bloomberg Terminal of crypto.

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Thank you to @dbarabander, @jessewldn, @AlanaDLevin, @NinaSuthers, @0xdegenciaga, @ianlapham, and @SharkFragile for contributing to this piece.