Bags’ launchpad fees surged to more than $100,000 on Jan. 16, a roughly 16,000% jump from the platform’s December daily average of about $640, marking its highest single-day revenue since inception. Over the same period, the number of tokens “graduating” from Bags overtook those graduating from Pump.fun, a long-standing benchmark for Solana-based token launches.
Bags is a Solana launchpad that allows users to create tokens tied to emerging software and internet trends — most recently, open-source AI projects.
The spike in Bags activity has coincided with a broader uptick across the Solana network. Over the past two weeks, the seven-day moving average of both transactions and active addresses on Solana has climbed by nearly 50%, according to The Block’s data.
The explosive growth stems from the virality of Anthropic’s Claude Code among developers, creating a feedback loop where speculators launched tokens for trending AI repositories.
In some cases, the actual AI project owner “claims” the token and redirects its trading fees to their wallet. This mechanism then creates speculative opportunities around which AI projects will attract developer attention and eventual claims.
However, the sustainability of these tokens and the activity they have generated depends on developers converting speculative tokens into claimed project assets and continuing to support them. If prominent AI developers begin claiming and building around their Bags tokens, the model and meta are validated. If not, the current wave merely represents pure speculation that is bound to collapse.
A prime example of how this meta can turn sour is the $GAS token, in which the project developer initially supported the token, causing its market cap to surge from ~$4 million to over $60 million at its peak within three days. However, as the token declined to a ~$10 million market cap days later, the project developer publicly denounced $GAS, causing it to collapse to under $1 million within the same hour.
This is an excerpt from The Block’s Data & Insights newsletter. Dig into the numbers making up the industry’s most thought-provoking trends.
© 2026 The Block. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.
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