In the previous three days, Solana memecoin projects have generated over $100 million through the contentious “presales” funding strategy.
With memecoin founders earning millions of Solana’s SOL through token presales in within the last 72 hours, the cryptocurrency community has begun to warn about “peak degeneracy.”
According to aggregated data published by cryptocurrency researcher 0xGumshoe, as of the time of writing, traders have transmitted around $100 million worth of SOL in an attempt to purchase fresh Solana memecoins in the previous 72 hours.
Through a contentious presale approach, several tokens—most notably Book of Meme (BOME), Nap (NAP), Nostalgia (NOS), and many more—have been raising money for unreleased currencies.
“This is peak degeneracy done right. A screenshot of excessive purchases on an unidentified memecoin was attached to a post made on March 18 by anonymous cryptocurrency investor Nick to X. “Aping $180k and $90k into memecoins.”
The contentious crowdfunding methodology used by the memecoin Book of Meme to debut propelled the memecoin presale frenzy.
At a starting valuation of about $4 million on March 14, the pseudonymous artist Darkfarms1 launched BOME. In less than 56 hours, BOME surged more than 36,000% to reach a high market capitalization of $1.45 billion.
According to a March 17 post from blockchain analytics platform Lookonchain, one early investor, Sundayfunday.sol, a personal friend of BOME’s developer, turned an initial investment of 420.69 SOL — worth $72,000 at the time — into a remarkable $32 million in less than three days.
When a cryptocurrency is sent to a wallet address for a “pre-sale,” investors receive a weighted distribution of tokens when the token is live.
Because there is no assurance that an investor will receive tokens in return for cryptocurrency sent to a presale wallet address, presales are a very popular way for con artists and fraudsters to defraud unsuspecting investors out of their money.
Anthony Sassano, an Ethereum educator, took a hard stance against the presale approach, calling anyone who contributed money to an unknown wallet address in the hopes of getting a token “dumb as hell.”
“After two years, everyone is back to bidding on ponzi schemes. People are free to spend their money anyway they like, but it is incredibly foolish to send money to a “memecoin presale” that has a 99.9% probability of being rigged.
However, the frenzy surrounding meme coins has spread well beyond the specialized world of crypto X. Entrepreneur David Sacks, who is well-known for co-hosting the All In the podcast, witnessed the drama surrounding his meme coin intensify, resulting in one fortunate user allegedly making about $39,000.
When Sacks first started talking about his memecoin on X, according to anonymous X user DeFiRabbitHole, they thought another All In memecoin would likewise gain value.
Elon Musk’s tweet to fellow All In podcast host Jason Calacanis, “Ok fine, I will buy ur coin,” caused the associated JASON coin to soar, increasing their initial investment from 1 SOL to 200 SOL.
