The past few months have been uphill for the crypto sector, marking some important milestones that have shaken the industry out of its long slumber. As most cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, have seen significant price spikes, several new tokens have managed to find their way into the crypto circuit in recent months. But warningly, independent blockchain researcher ZachXBT claims that multiple memecoin projects that were launched recently have now been abandoned.
In an update published on April 21, ZachXBT claimed that at least 12 memecoin projects have been abandoned in the last 30 days. All of these memecoins – including Pokeepandaa, RockyXBT, Pepecasso1 – are based on the Solana blockchain.
These memecoins have reportedly raised their valuation to over 180,650 SOL combined through pre-sale listings. Currently, Solana is trading at USD 135.71 (roughly Rs. 11,312), which means that the fund tied to these abandoned memecoins is approximately USD 27 million (roughly Rs. 225 crore).
TemplePharmacy_, Vombatus_Eth, Sartoshi0x, Jared_eth, BlueKirbyFTM, Emperor, urfSOL, Mr_Alevi and Gabrielesm1 are the names of other memecoins that made it to ZachXBT’s list of abandoned memecoins. “I would avoid any future projects started by these founders,” the blockchain researcher tweeted.
ZachXBT’s latest listing showed that Pokeepandaa, which is represented by the token name LIKE, raised the largest amount – 52,220 SOL or over $8 million (roughly 66 million rupees) through the pre-sale. Memecoin is currently reportedly down 99.2 percent. As of now developers have abandoned this token and others leading to a massive carpet pulling situation.
In March, ZachXBT tweeted that along with Solana, new tokens based on other blockchains were also available for pre-sale – warning investors to exercise caution before making financial decisions.
I was interested to see how many SOLs were shipped as a result of the presale targets and the calculated >655,000 SOL ($122.5M) collected from 27 presales. pic.twitter.com/dvsW4TSoov
— ZachXBT (@zachxbt) March 19, 2024
Rugpulls are among the most common forms of scams where crypto tokens are launched, traders are lured into investing in these tokens, only for the developers to collect all the invested amount and disappear.
Between January and March 2024, carpet pulling and exit scams reportedly caused a loss of $267 million (roughly Rs. 2,225 crore). Overall, more than $200 million (roughly Rs. 1,667 crore) has been lost to hacking and carpet pulling in 2024 so far.