The 2026 World Cup kicks off today with a match between Mexico and South Africa at the Azteca Stadium. The on-chain tournament has already started.
World Cup tokens generated $49.4 million in volume on decentralized exchanges in 24 hours. Social networks actively relay promotional initiatives. The feeds below reveal who actually bought.
Maximum excitement around the World Cup even before kickoff
The news feeds on X are full of promotions around tournament-related tokens. This article focuses only on on-chain data.
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BeInCrypto’s World Cup token screener tracks 93 tokens with at least $5,000 in liquidity and $1,000 in daily volume. The cumulative volume on DEXs for these World Cup tokens reached $49.4 million in 24 hours. In total, 34 tokens were launched over the past week.
World Cup token screener: Charlie Quant Lab
Data from Dune indicates that market-wide pair creations were down about 36% month-over-month, to roughly 6,700 per day. The World Cup ecosystem follows an opposite dynamic.
Weekly volume on DEXs across all blockchains reached $81.5 billion, an increase of 35.7% compared to the previous week. The daily volume of tokens on the theme of the World Cup (exclusively Fifa) however remains less than half a percent of this rate.
DEX Market Volume Trends: Dune Data
The theme is widely represented on Solana. This blockchain hosts 66 of the 93 tokens, generating approximately $43.5 million in daily volume, or almost 88% of the total.
According to Dune data, the total volume traded on Solana DEXs has fallen by 44.9% over the last 30 days. The chain nevertheless retains 47.9% of the overall market share. On Solana, the volume of tokens linked to the World Cup is increasing despite this downward trend, which suggests that the craze is triggered by the event itself rather than by a general rise in the market.
An exclusive enthusiasm indicator, developed by BeInCrypto, calculates the average of four values rated from 0 to 100: volume on DEXs, new tokens launched, share in world news and Wikipedia traffic. The indicator displays the maximum value of 100.
Maximum enthusiasm indicator for the theme: Charlie Quant Lab
The media part is based on GDELT, a database listing current affairs articles on a global scale.
Topics on the World Cup represent 0.83% of the analyzed coverage. Daily views on Wikipedia increased from around 80,000 in mid-May to 327,240 on June 9.
News trends and Wikipedia: Charlie Quant Lab
Attention represents one layer. Wallets that inject funds into it are another.
What whales and smart money have done
The BeInCrypto tracker recorded 608 whale transactions on the theme’s top 10 tokens in 24 hours, just before the first match. Purchases totaled $467,500, compared to $439,100 for sales.
The net flow stood at $28,400, or approximately 3% of the total volume. This reflects bilateral trade rather than net accumulation. The tokens called MESSI and GOAL concentrate most of this back and forth.
Whale buying and selling pressure: Charlie Quant Lab
Nansen’s flow data includes wallet labels, which are in most cases missing. The movements of whales and smart money remain generally stable on all tokens in the theme over the last seven days.
None of these groups hold a significant position one way or the other.
It is therefore the individual investors who stand out. New wallets added $64,800 in wrapped CHZ this week, at a rate 1.2 times higher than normal. Three of the four tokens analyzed have small net outflows to exchanges.
FWC26 on BNB Chain is an exception, with around $7,100 flowing to exchanges, a flow that often precedes sales. It should be noted that the GOAL token is featured on the BeInCrypto dashboard as well as in the Nansen data.
Données des chips Nansen World Cup : Données Nansen
The absence here constitutes information. The wallets which usually get ahead of thematic trades seem to be falling behind this time. This leaves control to new wallets and withdrawals from exchanges.
The feeds reveal who is missing. The token table illustrates quality.
Wash trading indices in the FIFA token table
The volume/capitalization ratio corresponds to the ratio between the daily trading volume and the total value of a token. Values much greater than 1 mean that the float changes hands several times per day, a pattern that suggests recycled volume.
Two pools of a newly minted Solana token together generated nearly $29 million in volume, or approximately 59% of the theme’s daily total. The displayed liquidity is less than $7,000 per pool.
The volume/capitalization ratio reaches 105x and 80x. Both pools display the screener’s maximum risk score of 100, which increases in the presence of red flags like low liquidity or recent deployment. Such numbers rarely reflect organic demand.
Most traded tokens by volume: Charlie Quant Lab
The launch schedule is just as revealing. Seven of the eight most active football tokens on Dune’s 30-day screen began trading between June 7 and 10.
Three different Solana tokens are traded under the symbol CR7. Their cumulative weekly volume is approaching $93 million, counting both directions of transactions. Two different MESSI tokens are listed on Solana and Base.
The top CR7 pools hold approximately $9.7 million in liquidity, with transactions averaging $8,000 to $12,000, the highest amounts currently.
WORLDCUP, trading since May 12, is the only thematic token with a full week of price history, and is up 96.9%.
GOT, aged 459 days, has the lowest risk score of the panel, but is under net selling pressure of 52%.
It is the quality which decides the passage to the final phase. The 2022 results and current prices set the framework.
Prices displayed after kick-off
World Cup PvP, the largest named token, trades around $0.040 on Ethereum. GOAL is listed at $0.00016 according to Nansen’s data. Wrapped Chiliz (CHZ) is hovering around $0.027 on Solana, while FWC is trading near $0.00008.
The 2022 cycle went through Socios fan tokens on the Chiliz blockchain, which the main DEX databases do not index. This cycle takes place across same coins on DEX.
A study by CoinGecko shows that fan tokens peaked in anticipation before the 2022 World Cup, then fell as soon as the matches started.
The Argentine token had climbed by around 1,000% in the six months preceding the competition, that of Portugal by 953%. Eliminations in the final stages caused a 51-59% drop in the losing team’s token. The Argentine token still lost 47% the day the team won the final.
We observe the same configuration today. The fervor reaches its peak even before the first match, and the token launches multiply. Smart money remains behind on all the tokens listed.
If 2022 repeats itself, World Cup tokens will decline as soon as attention shifts to on-field results. A sustained influx of new wallets, with a thematic volume greater than $49 million, could, however, reverse the trend.
World Cup tokens will either continue to attract buyers after kickoff or the latter will mark the peak, like in 2022.
Read the original article Which World Cup coins are trending on DEXs as FIFA fever begins? by Ananda Banerjee on fr.beincrypto.com
