It only took one idea, two minutes of typing, and four SOLs. Within an hour, Michael Anderson had created a financial asset worth over $25 million.
“I'm sitting here and wondering, 'What just happened?' » » Anderson, better known by his cryptocurrency nickname. Mandosaid Decrypt.
The absurd story of the asset in question, a Solana coin called “Epik Duck,” has a particular resonance in the crypto space right now – a frenzy in which a coin frenzy has been resurrected a long-standing enthusiasm within the industry, but has also threatened to consume it with a bare form of gaming that generally has no pretensions to technological advancement or utility.
Last month, during a weekly podcast he hosted with another crypto influencer, Keyboard Monkey, Mando began to think about creating his own coin. In recent months, meme-inspired crypto tokens have gone from irrelevance to several billion dollars evaluations.
In the past, meme coins were created for the first time like jokes making fun of the large number of hollow and worthless projects flooding the crypto industry – required a few quantity of technical feats to create and launch. But even that barrier has fallen: Services like Pump.fun now allow users to generate new meme coins on Solana in seconds, without writing a single line of code, for a few dollars of SOL.
While recording his live podcast, Mando went online Pompe.fun and chose an image from one of his favorite memes: the Epik Duck, a Roblox character that has resurfaced as a viral joke on Twitter in 2021. Mando titled his new piece “Epik Duck” and complemented the meme's pre-existing tagline: “The Epik Duck is coming.” He then paid 4 SOL to throw the token – more than necessary – and clicked “throw”. The whole thing lasted less than two minutes.
Epik Duck instantly went viral, thanks in part to listeners of Mando's podcast, who jumped on the token. In 10 minutes, the coin reached a market capitalization of $1 million. In one hour, it exceeded $25 million.
The 4 SOL Mando had used to launch Epik Duck? This sum, with an initial value of around $740, allowed the influencer to acquire 15% of his own token reserve, a bag with a sudden value of $3.75 million.
That's when a ridiculous situation suddenly became a lot less funny, as Mando recounts. Within hours, the token's market capitalization fell to $2 million. In the process, many Epik Duck holders have made and lost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Mando says he decided to burn his own tokens, fearing people would get the wrong idea of his intentions.
“I’m not going to get canceled for this,” Mado said to himself at the time. “I didn't want people to think I made money from it, that I planned to do it. It had gone completely crazy.
What started as a joke quickly turned into something more serious: a multi-million dollar company with thousands of shareholders, and Mando suddenly and unintentionally in the CEO chair.
“From that point on, it became about reputation,” Mando said. “I was a man whose mission was to make it work.”
But what exactly does it mean to create a meme coin? work? Unlike other arguably worthless assets floating around the cryptosphere, meme coins, for self-definition, have no purpose. All their usefulness once pointed out, as meta-commentary, the lack of usefulness of cryptography.
Mando sees things differently, but he's not your average trader. The crypto influencer previously worked at Barclays and Goldman Sachs trading distressed and high-yield bonds before emptying his and his wife's savings accounts in 2021 to purchase 80 Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs. (He ended up selling them for 700% profit.)
For Mando, in their total absence of any pretension of meaning, the meme pieces are the the purest form of money.
“We all believe in the dollar. It’s a meme,” Mando said. “We all believe in Bitcoin, it’s a meme.”
“Meme coins, to me, are cryptocurrencies in their purest form,” he continued. “Meme coins are a quick way to believe in the intrinsic value of something.”
So running Epik Duck was like running anything else, in a world devoid of natural value. It was just a game to convince people.
So Mando started a website for Epik Duck, with a Twitter account and telegram channel– then a Chinese Telegram channel and a WeChat account. He hired moderators for his social media operations and pushed Epik Duck as hard as he could. He said he barely sleeps these days as the Duck increasingly dominates his life.
The work had mixed results. Although the token has fallen significantly since last month, some people still believe that Epik Duck has value; or at least some people still believe others believe it has value. Since falling from its high of $25 million, the coin still maintains a market cap of $12 million at the time of writing, according to CoinGecko.
In the meantime, Mando repurchased an undisclosed sum of tokens, primarily, he says, to pay exchanges and market makers and fund community rewards programs. He says he owns between 3% and 5% of the token supply.
He also invested, with his business partners, in Pump.fun, praising the Epik Duck saga as proof of the protocol's democratizing potential to enable any crypto user, like himself, to create something from nothing.
Not everyone sees Pump.fun's ascendancy in such a positive way. Last month, a senior executive at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz ridiculed the current explosion of meme coin generation as “undermining the long-term vision of crypto” by turning the industry into “a risky casino.”
“This profoundly affects adoption, regulation/laws and builder behavior,” said Executive Eddy Lazzarin. “I see the damage every day. You should too.”
Disgruntled former Pump.fun employee on Thursday hacked the protocol in a $2 million exploit that caused the site to temporarily shut down. The hacker later stated that he had intended to “kill” Pump.fun with this attack.
“It inadvertently hurt people for a long time,” the former employee later said, explaining the motivations for his attack on the site.
On Friday, over 23,000 new fungible tokens were created on the Solana network, an all-time daily record. Just months agothis figure fluctuated on average around 300 per day.
Edited by Andrew Hayward
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