Another day, another memecoin that lost people a lot of money. Or make people a lot of money, depending on how you see it.
This isn't a reference to the dogwifhat NFT selling for $4 million (which also happened today) – what I'm referring to is the disastrous pre-sale of the sloth-themed token SLERF by anonymous team member Slerf.
In the wave of Solana memecoin listings, SLERF was just another presale that raised a ridiculous amount of money in just a few days (about $10 million). However, what sets SLERF apart from other meme coins that have either lost momentum or become maliciously aggressive is that one of the SLERF team members accidentally (and we believe) burned down the entire $10 million presale with a bad click.
Read more from our opinion section: The memcoin may be getting the Las Vegas treatment, but cryptocurrency advertising rarely ages well
while some Owns claimed That SLERF teammate Slerf engineered the pre-sale burner for his own nefarious purposes, anyone listening to him actually cry during the hours-long Twitter space earlier today makes it so difficult To swallow that the whole thing was just a marketing ploy.
Why is losing $10 million of investors' money considered a marketing ploy? Because, in the reactionary ways of crypto-land, the massive amount of interest in SLERF sent the token's price over a dollar at one point, with some traders. to prepare Millions on the bad news pump. A speaker in the top Twitter space today said that although he lost three SOL in the burn, he gained 10 times by buying the news.
However, for the other twenty-five thousand pre-sale investors who lost money, the market did not see much sympathy. Another speaker on Slerf's first Twitter space today placed the blame squarely at the feet of the victims themselves: “The people who were scammed sent a random amount of money to a random online wallet.”
Others have sympathy As for Slorp and his $10 million error, but very little for those affected by said error: “The reality is that people should expect to lose money to meme coins.”
Encryption is volatile this way. If you send a bunch of money to a coin with a dog in a knit hat on it and you make a bunch of money, you're a genius. But if you send a bunch of money to a sloth coin in front of a computer and you lose a bunch of money, you're a fool.
But no one, no matter how ridiculous their investments may seem from the outside, deserves to lose their money.
As someone else said in the Twitter space today, we're “a bunch of fucking gambling addicts.” But trying to write off investing in memecoin as “gambling” does not make it acceptable to believe that people should lose their money because of the risk.
The hype surrounding the cryptocurrency market, especially with memes, often revolves around the feeling of FOMO, of always being a little bit behind on the next big thing that you can't make millions. Crypto Twitter perpetuates the myth that if you get in a little sooner, you'll ride your Lambo into the sunset.
If you're going to blame anyone for losing money investing in memecoin, you should blame the culture that promotes unrealistic gains to prey on those who are willing to risk their money for these elusive, high returns.
Blaming and slandering those who try to match the lifestyles they see on the encrypted side of the internet is meaningless, and will change nothing.
None of the blame matters anyway if SLERF's trading volume today after A $10 million accidental burn is any indication.
Disclaimer: This article was updated at 3:55 PM EST to note that it was the anonymous SLERF team member Slerf associated with the SLERF presale, not Slorg. Slorg is not affiliated with SLERF.
I don't care much about technology, and I don't care much about finance either. I'm interested in writing stories and watching strange things unfold. That's why I ended up in crypto.
But because I miss that passion for what cryptocurrency and blockchain are – finance, technology, privacy, etc. – I will instead write about what I'm actually interested in. Everything about cryptocurrencies has little to do with crypto.
And that's what this column will be about. All the episodic stories coming out of the blockchain and cryptocurrency space, what I think about them, and how I approach it all as a skeptical former Russian literature specialist.
It is precisely my status as an outsider that allows me to do what I do: express an opinion from all sides on any cryptocurrency issue, with no strings attached in the game.
If you want to talk to me about cryptocurrencies, let's get out of the way.
Don't miss the next big story – join our free daily newsletter.
