Scammers, masterminds, and couriers... taking stock of Memecoin’s 2024 Person of the Year

Review of the 2024 series of Meme Circle Gods.

Author: Arain, ChainCatcher

In 2024, the Memecoin track suddenly emerged, developing a super cycle amidst mixed reputations and reputations, which surprised many Old Money.

In the Memecoin trading battlefield, there are genius fraudsters who use cunning means to set up "wealth traps", there are masters who game the market with precise judgment and operations, and there are traders who use their influence to bring traffic to the token. Wang, and the order king who controls the market trend by placing orders... These figures of the year took the stage and jointly created a carnival feast for Memecoin.

Alon

Without the meme launcher Pump.fun, this meme feast carnival might be half as bad. So in this sense, Alone is the key figure to start the Memecoin craze in 2024.

Alon created and launched the Pump.fun platform in January 2024 to provide users on the Solana blockchain with a place to create and trade cryptocurrencies, allowing users to create Solana tokens in under a minute for free.

As of December 26, 2024, more than 5 million Memecoins have been created on the platform, including many larger Memecoins, such as Billy, Michi, Shark Cat, etc. The platform has also laid the foundation for the mass production of celebrity Memecoin, such as Lggy Azalea's MOTHER token, Andrew Tate-endorsed DADDY, and Jason Derulo's JASON.

Although mass manufacturing of Memecoin will oversaturate the market, it is undeniable that Pump.fu provides a platform and opportunity for the development and innovation of Memecoin, which has had a profound impact on the development of the entire Memecoin ecosystem.

Murad

One of the top Memecoin KOLs in 2024 and known as the "Meme Theologian".

Murad mainly has two achievements, one is his successful investment in $SPX, and the other is his fame for proposing the Memecoin Supercycle theory.

The content of the Memecoin Supercycle theory Murad believes that Memecoin is gaining attributes and speculative premiums from value coins and will enter a "Meme super cycle", that is, Memecoin will not only surpass traditional cryptocurrencies, but also change investor behavior and market trends. Memecoin will Evolved from a mere internet joke into a legitimate investment asset with a passionate following.

When Murad first held $SPX, the market value of the currency was only US$10 million. Now it has surged to more than US$700 million, with floating profits as high as US$8.3 million. While holding the currency, he actively spreads investment ideas on Twitter. His position holding and order placing behavior had a certain impact on the price trends of these currencies, and also attracted the attention and following of many investors. In addition to $SPX, Murad also holds giga, pepe, sigma, apu, popcat and other currencies, and prefers the "cult attribute" Memecoin with medium and high market capitalization.

According to Murad's own summary, he mainly adopts the "Price and Belief Index" investment strategy, which believes that investors should look for projects with high beliefs but low prices, that is, Memecoins that are undervalued but meet most of the screening criteria. These projects usually only have One or two indicators are not up to standard, it is easy to improve, and it has extremely enthusiastic community support.

After appearing and delivering a speech at Token2049, Murad's status in the Memecoin circle reached a new level. Due to his systematic Memecoin investment and strategy, more investors began to study Memecoin - even some VCs.

Ansem

Another KOL among the top Memecoin KOLs in 2024 can be as famous as Murad.

But compared to Murad, Ansem has a heavier trading label and believes that technical analysis is more important than fundamental analysis. Ansem mainly attracts market attention for its investments in BONK and WIF. On October 30, 2023, Ansem released X "bonk great coin" on social media, recommending BONK for the first time. At that time, the price of BONK was only $0.0000005618. Subsequently, BONK skyrocketed. By March 2024, the price of BONK once exceeded $0.000045, an increase of more than 80 times.

As for WIF, it can be said that it was gradually promoted by Ansem to a market value of 3 billion. On December 12, 2023, Ansem stated on social media that only WIF has the potential of SHIB, and posted "WIF = SHIB" on December 16. Within 4 months, the price of WIF soared from US$0.09 to a record high of US$4.85, an increase of more than 520 times.

Due to his frequent recommendation of some small-market Memecoins, which resulted in losses for his followers, Ansem is currently facing some lawsuits. Some other KOLs accused Ansem of blatantly "cutting leeks". In the face of accusations, Ansem said that he was only choosing the best deal in the market and could not Make sure every deal is successful but helps more people than it hurts. Some analysts backtest investment returns through Ansem's previous recommendations. Most currencies will have negative returns if bought after Ansem's recommendations.

Sahil Arora

When the incident was exposed due to being "crusaded" by many celebrities, this fraudster from India once caused a sensation in the market and caused a large number of investor losses.

Sahil Arora is a serial entrepreneur who started multiple encryption projects from 2020 to 2023. Although they ended in failure, they made a lot of profits.

In 2024, Sahil Arora found a business opportunity on Memecoin, using his influence and certification mark on Instagram to contact many celebrities and cooperate with them to issue tokens. Help these celebrities issue Memecoin, usually hold 25%-40% of the token supply, and quickly sell the tokens after the celebrities' tweets are released, using the investment of celebrity fans as his "exit liquidity."

For example:

• Spending $200,000 to hire Jason Derulo to tweet about the token;
• Signed a contract with Caitlyn Jenner to issue the token JENNER, and agreed to pay an advance payment of US$50,000 and 80% of the revenue share. However, the cooperation turned into a farce. Jenner accused him of breach of contract and publicly swore that he was a fraud. He killed himself and owed her "a lot of money";
• Issue tokens for celebrities such as Rich the Kid and Lil Pump, who have also complained about similar experiences;

Through data analysis, data company Bubbleworks believes that Sahil Arora earned approximately US$30 million this year by issuing Memecoin for celebrity agents.

Lggy Azalea

The famous Australian rapper Lggy Azalea should be considered the celebrity Memecoin trend leader in 2024. In fact, Sahil Arora also tried to trick Lggy Azalea and wanted to help her release Memecin $LGG, but was not very successful.

LggyAzalea decided to issue Memecoin himself. The reason was that she found someone pretending to be her on Telegram to issue coins, so she simply launched the token MOTHER on Pump.fun on May 28, 2024, and focused her X account with 7.6 million fans on promoting the MOTHER coin, and deleted it Collected all posts before May 29, published 2245 posts about MOTHER, and also placed MOTHER’s Telegram on Instagram channel link and paused her OnlyFans, directing fans to the Telegram channel. Within a week of its release, the price of MOTHER coin surged by 1,200%.

Subsequently, LggyAzalea appeared in multiple community Spaces, interacted with community members, responded through voice messages, and also appeared on the ThreadGuy podcast to share his insights on cryptocurrency and Web3.

As Memecoin becomes more and more popular, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin expressed dissatisfaction with the celebrity Memecoin craze, believing that these coins are only used to make celebrities and early users rich and have no practical use. LggyAzalea immediately took on V God and posted a spoof picture of himself holding V God’s baby, saying “he is angry and hungry.” The price of the random $MOTHER token once rose by 150%, and also led to a wave of “family tokens” , tokens such as $DADDY and $SON have risen accordingly.

LggyAzalea not only knows how to criticize, but after criticizing V God, she opened an online store, which allowed that only T-shirts and other products can be purchased with MOTHER. She also announced that you can use MOTHER or SOL to purchase mobile phones, purchase mobile phone plans on a monthly basis, etc., to avoid $MOTHER. Value is nothing.

Caitlyn Jenner

Caitlyn Jenner is an American flag TV personality and former track and field athlete. Like Lggy Azalea, Caitlyn Jenner’s own media influence and public image attract more people to pay attention to memecoin, but the difference is that the Memecoin issued by Caitlyn Jenner does not It was unsuccessful and eventually led to it being sued by investors.

In May 2024, Caitlyn Jenner issued a token called $Jenner on Pump.fun, posted a photo of shaking hands with Trump through her Twitter account and attached a link to the $Jenner token, and also circled several famous cryptocurrencies KOLs call them “crypto kings”. Subsequently, a Story about $Jenner tokens was released, and its agent Sophia also forwarded it.

Since Caitlyn Jenner has not been involved in the crypto field before, her fans suspected that her account was stolen. However, Caitlyn Jenner stated that her account was not stolen and released a video of herself showing her face to refute the rumors, saying that $Jenner was indeed posted by her team.

During the period when the currency price fluctuated sharply due to various doubts, Caitlyn Jenner's Twitter account held a Space, and her agent Sophia planned to personally refute the rumors in Space. However, Sophia said in Space that the team may also issue a new token, and the market began to sell off $Jenner. Although Caitlyn Jenner later declared that the team would only focus on $Jenner and would not launch other tokens, it did not help.

According to Lookonchain monitoring, Caitlyn Jenner earned 2,381 SOL (approximately $405,000) by launching 12 MEMEcoins on Solana in the past 4 days in May 2024.

On November 13, 2024, Naeem Azad and Mihai Caluseru filed a class action lawsuit in California federal court as British and Romanian citizens respectively, alleging that Caitlyn Jenner and her manager Sophia Hutchins fraudulently solicited investors to purchase unregistered securities, resulting in They suffered heavy losses.

I don’t know if Caitlyn Jenner will feel that the gains outweigh the losses after spending her fan value of 400,000 US dollars, which caused an official scandal?

James Wynn

The new order-calling king of the year once made 25 million US dollars because of his heavy position in PEPE, but also overturned because of his ugly appearance.

James Wynn quickly bought PEPE coin within 1 day after it went online, and placed a large number of orders on Twitter. On April 16, 2023 alone, he published at least 24 pieces of promotional content about PEPE coin to help PEPE coin. The popularity on social media increased, attracting the attention of more investors and the meme community.

On May 1st, the price of PEPE coins increased 100 times compared to the cost of James Wynn. James Wyn was found to have transferred the PEPE coins he held to multiple new addresses, and gradually returned the assets through the operation of multiple wallet addresses. Collect it into the main wallet jwynn.eth, and finally transfer funds to the exchange address. According to media statistics, James Wynn earned approximately US$25 million from the surge in PEPE tokens, with a principal of only US$7,644.

Subsequently, James Wynn began to place orders for ELON tokens. On April 24, 2024, James Wynn tweeted "I think I have a 1000x for you, who wants it?" One hour before posting the tweet, he had just completed two accounts on The layout of the ELON token was subsequently announced, and the price of the ELON token increased nearly 100 times in a short period of time.

On April 27, the price of ELON suddenly dropped 70%. James Wynn later announced on Twitter that he had cleared his position, and said that there was a problem with the ELON token. In fact, he had used another uncommon address to clear his position as early as 3:00 on the 25th. His liquidation behavior caused the ELON token to be liquidated. The collapse of the currency. According to statistics, during this operation, James Wynn's two accounts were both in the top ten profit list, with a profit of approximately US$350,000.

Because James Wynn's liquidation behavior directly led to the collapse of ELON prices, James Wynn's image in the community collapsed, and he was directly accused of cutting leeks.

Justin Sun

For such a character celebration, Brother Sun is still needed.

In August 2024, TRON launched the SunPump Beta version, which is known as the first Memecoin platform in the TRON ecosystem with the concept of fair distribution. SunPump can be understood as a benchmark against Pump.fun. Although TRON claims that SunPump is not Justin Sun's project, the public still associates Justin Sun with SunPump.

After the launch of SunPump, Justin Sun spared no effort to promote it, and published an article predicting that the tron ​​chain will soon give birth to Memecoin with a market value of more than 1 billion US dollars, saying that TRON has a deep integration with Meme culture.

In addition, Justin Sun is also making plans in other areas of Memecoin. For example, it invested US$10 million in Shib's forked token SHIB Ultra, making it the largest investor in the project.

In 2024, Justin Sun’s most prominent incident on Memecoin was the “expensive banana” incident. He paid $6.24 million for Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan's conceptual artwork "Comedian" (a banana taped to the wall) and ate it during the live broadcast as a tribute to Meme culture. This triggered public discussion on Meme culture. Through this incident, he successfully combined art with Meme culture and expanded Meme's circle.

Elon Musk

Elon Musk is already an important figure in the cryptocurrency circle. Although he did not deliberately promote the historical process of Memecoin, he certainly made a mark in the history of Memecoin's development. Elon Musk believes that meme is a modern art that can effectively convey information and emotions. He once said, "Whoever controls memes controls the world." This sentence reflects his understanding of Meme culture.

Elon Musk's most widely known Memecoin investment is Doge. In 2020, Musk began to frequently tweet about Dogecoin, such as "dogetothemoon" and other tweets, pushing Dogecoin from a relatively niche cryptocurrency to the attention of global investors. At the beginning of 2021, Tesla CEO’s tweet “doge” coupled with the rocket emoticon caused the price of Dogecoin to skyrocket, breaking through the historical mark of $1. Additionally, Musk had planned for Tesla to accept Dogecoin as payment, but the plan was later suspended. In April 2023, Musk changed the icon of X to a Shiba Inu, and Dogecoin rose by 30% that day. In 2024, Musk sparked a bullish trend in Dogecoin by paying tribute to Kabosu, the original dog behind the Dogecoin meme, in an X post.

In addition to Dogecoin, Musk also has no intention of bringing goods for some Memecoins (note that this is different from placing orders):

• In December 2023, Musk announced that he would launch the first AI model GROK, and Memecoin with the same name was subsequently established, which increased fivefold in two days (however, it was revealed that GROK was created by a scam artist, and the coin later plummeted);
• On January 9, 2024, Musk changed his Twitter profile to (CTO) chief Troll Officer, and then the TROLL currency price soared;
• On January 16, 2024, Musk released a Meme picture. Because the text on it contained Meme and smiley face elements, the price of SMILEY, a token previously deployed on Ethereum, rose accordingly, with a one-day increase of as much as 895%;

Musk’s words and deeds have attracted much attention in the cryptocurrency circle, and the market often floods with Memecoin creations that are themed or inspired by him. For example, the “ClosedAI” token rose by more than 2,800 yuan in three hours after Musk criticized OpenAI. %.

Recently, Musk changed his Twitter avatar to a Meme image similar to Pepe the Frog, and directly changed his name to Kekius Maximus. PEPE rose in response, and multiple Memecoins of the Kekius Maximus concept also began to surge briefly.

Donald John Trump

The incoming and former President of the United States, Donald John Trump, is often put together with Musk and brings some Memecoin trading opportunities. At least so far, Donald John Trump is on the receiving end.

In May 2024, at the Trump Card NFT Gala held at Mar-a-Lago, when a participant introduced him to the “boden” meme coin with a market value of US$240 million, Trump said, “I don’t like that investment.” But then, the meme coin rose 25% on Wednesday, reaching a maximum of $0.42.

On August 12, 2024, in the Trump-related $TRUMPMemecoin, a trader allegedly spent 0.052ETH (approximately $96 at the time) to purchase 608,650 "TRUMP" tokens. By June 2024, the market value of the currency had soared. to $788 million.