Failed Memcoins. Is it possible to get your money back?
In the summer of 2023, coins on the Base blockchain (a second-level solution for the Ethereum network from the American exchange Coinbase) began to appear en masse. One of these tokens, BALD, gave 289000% price growth in just the first 14 hours since the start of trading. This is despite the fact that the token has no official website, utility, or any apparent purpose. Four different wallet addresses exchanged 0.5 ETH, worth about $950 at the time, for BALD within the first four minutes of trading. Eight hours later, these wallet addresses exchanged their BALDs for ETH totaling 554 ETH, which was worth over $1 million at the time. Another memcoin with the ticker BASED also experienced an incredible rally: it rose more than 1,000,000% in 20 hours. The coin had a capitalization of $1.39 billion, which was more than the developed blockchain networks Aave and Optimism (OP). However, the BASED coin soon fell in value and is now of little interest to anyone.
In 2024, the madness continues. Pepe soars another 10x and the "dogs" are updating highs, like Floki and WIF for example.
Failed projects
The vast majority of examples are when a memcoin is deflated in a matter of days and ceases to be of interest even to a seemingly loyal audience. If we visit a graveyard of dead coins, we will see a lot of names on the plaques indicating that they belong to memcoins: JesusCoin, PayCon, AssPennies, CryptoMeth, ObamaCoin.... A lot of noise was made in its time by the SQUID project, allegedly created by the creators of the TV series "The Squid Game". SQUID coins were sold as service coins for a future game based on the TV series. The series was at the height of its popularity, and not surprisingly, the coin rose 45000% in just one month. And then collapsed to zero due to the fact that the creators of the coin withdrew the funds through a smart contract embedded in the coin's code. The developers of the SQUID coin got about $3.4 million. It was back in October 2021. Now the SQUID coin is still finding demand! And it even recently went from 1 to 2 cents. The coin is transacted on the decentralized exchange Pancake Swap. There are also meme tokens whose life cycle is immediately designed for days, or even hours. For example, on Bitcoin Pizza Day, BTCPizza, BPizza, PizzaDay, and EthPizza coins appeared, raising a total of about $300,000 in revenue. No development is envisioned for these coins.
Many people have lost a lot of money buying a popular coin on a HYIP. Many of them continue to get cheaper to this day.
