During the March memecoin craze, investors in Solana got caught in a web of lies when more than a dozen memecoin pre-sales that raised over $26 million turned out to be fake. After the rug was pulled out from under them, investors were left with nothing.
Blockchain researcher ZachXBT shed light on the sad truth by finding a series of failed memecoin pre-sales on Solana. He did some math and came up with a shocking number: over 180,650 SOL tokens, worth about $28 million, had been stolen in what looks like an organized scam.
One person who gave in to the temptation was a user only known by the name @pokeepandaa. Their investment, more than 52,000 SOL, made up almost 30% of all the known memecoin pre-sales that suddenly disappeared.
Solana’s Ecosystem Witnesses Rising Memecoin Pre-Sales
This scary trend didn’t start by itself. Memecoin pre-sales have risen in the Solana community since the middle of March, bringing in over $150 million worth of SOL. Some projects didn’t end up as badly as the most recent victims, but ZachXBT said that the sheer size of the problem is something to worry about. This pattern is also happening on Base, a layer-2 solution that Coinbase created, which points to a bigger problem in the crypto world.
These bots were looking for arbitrage chances caused by the unstable price of memecoin. Many failed transactions, called “bot spam,” filled the network when these chances disappeared. Helis CEO Mert Mumtaz said that most of the failed transactions on Solana were bot spam.
As investors deal with the effects of these “rug pulls,” questions about governmental oversight and protecting investors are very much on their minds. The memecoin craze doesn’t seem to be going away, so the government is under increasing pressure to stop the scams and protect buyers from being taken advantage of again.
