USELESS Hits $400M ATH with OI Above DOGE, SHIB, PEPE Combined

USELESS printed a fresh $400 million all time high on May 27, 2026, sitting on top of one of the most lopsided derivative markets in crypto. According to @aixbt_agent, perpetual open interest for USELESS on Lighter DEX now exceeds the combined OI of DOGE, SHIB, PEPE, BONK, PENGU, TRUMP, FLOKI, SPX, WIF and POPCAT. A token whose branding is the absence of utility has a deeper futures market than memes worth ten times its cap.

The "zero utility" memecoin meta in its purest form

Most memecoins still try to sell something. A roadmap, a Layer 2, a payments narrative, a charity angle. USELESS removes all of that and ships the joke as the product. There is no app, no staking, no governance, no DeFi integration. The pitch is the name. That honesty is what traders are paying for in 2026, because every other rotation in this cycle has ended the same way: utility tokens promising adoption that never lands, then deflating as the story breaks.

By telling the market nothing is coming, USELESS removes the disappointment vector. The chart becomes pure reflexivity, and the spread between expectation and reality stays at zero. That is rare and it is a big part of why liquidity keeps stacking on this name.

Lighter DEX open interest breakdown

The headline number is the comparison. On Lighter DEX, perpetual open interest in USELESS is now larger than the combined OI of:

• DOGE the original memecoin, $20B+ cap
• SHIB ecosystem token, billions in TVL
• PEPE 2023 cycle leader
• BONK Solana flagship meme
• PENGU Pudgy Penguins token
• TRUMP Solana political meme
• FLOKI long running cross chain meme
• SPX SPX6900 satire token
• WIF dogwifhat, the 2024 standout
• POPCAT Solana cat meme

Add their open interest together and USELESS is still bigger. Several of those names have caps in the hundreds of millions to multiple billions and have been listed on every major perp venue for years. USELESS is younger, smaller in cap, and yet the derivatives book is deeper.

Why traders prefer USELESS perps

Three forces are stacking. First, Lighter DEX has become the venue of choice for memecoin perps thanks to order book depth and low fees, and USELESS got there early. Second, volatility is high enough that funding and intraday range produce real PnL on small size, pulling in active traders. Third, the narrative is self reinforcing: every screenshot of USELESS over DOGE on OI brings more capital in.

Older memecoins do not offer the same setup. DOGE and SHIB have heavy retail bag holders. PEPE and WIF have already had their parabolic phase. USELESS is still in price discovery and that is where leverage demand concentrates.

From zero to $400M: the runup

USELESS launched as a community token with no presale, no team allocation, no roadmap. The early months were quiet. The flip came when the perpetual market opened on Lighter and traders started using it as a high beta proxy for Solana memes. From there the spiral was familiar: rising OI, rising spot, more attention, more OI. The $400M ATH on May 27 caps a run that turned a punchline into one of the most actively traded crypto derivatives.

For broader context on how Solana memes keep producing these moves, see our complete guide to Solana memecoins in 2026.

Top signal, or new paradigm?

The bearish read is obvious. When a zero utility token has more derivative exposure than ten established memecoins combined, that is the kind of OI concentration that historically marks a local top. A sharp deleveraging cascade would hit USELESS first and hardest.

The bullish read is structural. USELESS may be the prototype for a new memecoin model where the absence of utility is the moat. No roadmap means no broken promises. No team means no insider dumps. No utility means no valuation framework to argue against. If the model keeps working, the next cycle of memes will look more like USELESS and less like the utility wrapped tokens of 2024 and 2025.