The crypto industry has begun to warn of “peak degeneracy,” with memecoin founders making millions of dollars from Solana’s SOLSOL$202 token presales in only the previous 72 hours.
Crypto traders have sent approximately $100 million in SOL in the last 72 hours in a bid to purchase into new Solana memecoins, according to aggregated data accessed by reported by crypto researcher 0xGumshoe.
These tokens, most notably Book of Meme (BOME), Nap (NAP), Nostalgia (NOS), and many others, have used a contentious presale mechanism to raise funds for unreleased coins.
“This is legitimate peak degeneracy. “Aping $180k and $90k into memecoins,” wrote pseudonymous crypto investor Nick in a March 18 post to X, attaching a screenshot of massive buys on an unidentified memecoin.
The memecoin presale craze was sparked when a memecoin called Book of Meme began using the contentious crowdfunding concept.
BOME, founded on March 14 by pseudonymous artist Darkfarms1 with an initial worth of roughly $4 million, soared more than 36,000% to a high market capitalization of $1.45 billion in less than 56 hours.
According to a March 17 post on 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 stunning $32 million in less than three days.
A “pre-sale” involves crypto investors transferring a cryptocurrency to a wallet address and then receiving a weighted distribution of tokens in exchange when the token goes live.
There is no guarantee that an investor will receive tokens in return for the cryptocurrency submitted to a presale wallet address, making presales a popular method for fraudsters and scammers to steal money from unsuspecting customers.
Ethereum professor Anthony Sassano slammed the presale concept, calling anyone who paid money to a random wallet address with the intention of obtaining a token “dumb as hell.”
“2 years later, and everyone is back to bidding ponzis. People can do whatever they want with their money, but sending money to a’memecoin presale’ with a 99.9% probability of rugging is simply stupid as hell.”
Meanwhile, memecoin craze has spread well beyond the sphere of crypto X.
Entrepreneur David Sacks, best known as the co-host of the All In podcast, witnessed the turmoil around his memecoin intensify, allowing one lucky user to purportedly make approximately $39,000 from the scenario.
Pseudonymous X user DeFiRabbitHole stated that when Sacks first started talking about his memecoin on X, they expected another All In memecoin to follow suit.
So, when Elon Musk tweeted, “Ok fine, I will buy ur coin,” to fellow All In show host Jason Calacanis, the linked JASON coin soared, doubling their initial investment of 1 SOL to 200 SOL.
