In the past month, a total of 12 Solana presale memecoins have been completely abandoned after raising a combined $26.7 million from investors, as reported by independent blockchain investigator ZachXBT. ZachXBT highlighted these 12 Solana memecoin projects in a post on April 21, revealing that many of them have experienced significant drops in value since their launch, and one of them hasn’t even launched its token yet.
According to ZachXBT, the most expensive abandoned presale project was a memecoin called “I like this coin,” with the ticker LIKE. The project’s founder, who goes by the pseudonym pokeee.eth, managed to raise an astonishing 52,220 SOL tokens (equivalent to $7.7 million at current prices) for the memecoin. The coin was launched on March 17 with a market capitalization of $577 million. However, the value of LIKE plummeted rapidly, dropping over 90% within the first eight hours. Currently, LIKE is down 99.2% from its launch price. Interestingly, the official X account for the memecoin hasn’t posted anything new since March 31, and pokeee.eth hasn’t mentioned the coin either.
The second-largest abandoned presale is for a token called MOONKE. It was launched by another pseudonymous founder named RockyXBT on March 20 with a valuation of nearly $500 million. However, MOONKE followed a similar path as LIKE, experiencing a drop of over 99% from its launch price in just a few hours.
One project that managed to raise 4,567 SOL ($812,000 at current prices) never even launched its token.
Cointelegraph tried to contact pokeee.eth and RockyXBT for comments but received no response.
Recently, the market’s interest in memecoins has waned, with several of the larger Solana-based memecoins, including Dogwifhat (WIF), seeing a decline of over 40% since April 1.
Last month’s memecoin frenzy drew comparisons to the boom of initial coin offerings (ICOs) on Ethereum in 2017, where numerous crypto projects raised millions of dollars but ultimately failed to deliver.
One notable Solana presale mishap occurred in March when the developer of a memecoin called Slerf (SLERF) accidentally burned the entire presale allocation of SLERF in a “fat finger” burn error. Despite this mistake, Slerf became a favorite among memecoin investors and reached a peak market cap of around $750 million.
In a related article, it was revealed that 1 in 6 new Base meme coins are scams, and 91% of them have vulnerabilities.