$10M accidentally burned as Solana memecoin craze continues
With Solana’s memecoin mania seemingly reaching fever pitch, multiple token presales have been announced over the past few days with varied results.
One such project, SLERF, raised $10M on Solana before disaster struck at launch.
According to the project’s developer, while attempting to burn SLERF’s LP tokens (which would ensure liquidity for trading the token) they also accidentally burned the tokens allocated to presale investors.
With the minting functionality already disabled, there was little to be done for those who had invested before launch.
However, the error seemed to draw plenty of attention and, with no presale holders to dump on them, memecoin-hungry traders aped in.
Some have cast doubts over whether the token burn really was an ‘accident’, due to on-chain clues such as the founder refunding himself before burning the tokens, and a $1.9M buy made directly after the event, when there was no risk of being dumped on.
Despite the scandal surrounding the launch, multiple centralized exchanges (HTX, Bitget, MEXC and LBank) saw fit to list the token.
In a follow-up tweet, the project’s X (formerly Twitter) account summed up the situation: “On a positive note: we made history on the negative note a ton of people have lost their money”.
Memecoin mania
Solana’s recent memecoin season has become increasingly bizarre, with tokens inspired by misspelled politicians’ names and a dog ‘wif’ a hat (WIF) doing serious numbers. WIF itself reached over $3B market cap last week, according to data from CoinMarketCap.
Rather than using established processes or even smart contracts, however, those launching the tokens are often simply tweeting out an address, with ‘investors’ sending funds in blind faith.
The practice was widely ridiculed just months ago when gung-ho BitBoy-associate ben.eth used it to launch his token, PSYOP. A few weeks of green markets seems to have shifted what is deemed acceptable amongst the crypto crowd.
While Solana has been the main focus of the activity, even causing technical issues (surprise, surprise), Avalanche has also tried to tempt the memecoiners onto their chain, but to little avail.
Some recent memecoin examples include a token with a 95% sell tax, a (hot) POTATO token, with a total supply of just 1, and an overall lack of competence.
Others have jumped on the trend aiming to teach a lesson, either by sending a ‘soulbound’ (non-transferrable) dunce hat NFT to ‘investors’ before allowing funds to be withdrawn or, more cynically, suggesting presale ‘investors’ send funds to the burn address (where their tokens would be unrecoverable).
As ever, scammers took the opportunity to impersonate well-known accounts, with one case netting over $2.6M.