Presales of memecoins on the Solana blockchain experienced a surge in popularity, raising over $100 million in just three days.
Some members of the crypto community cautioned against significant risks associated with purchasing tokens during memecoin presales, citing the rapid fundraising and potential market recklessness.
An analysis by crypto researcher 0xGumshoe revealed that crypto traders invested approximately $100 million worth of SOL in the past 72 hours to participate in new memecoin projects on Solana.
Memecoins like Book of Meme, Nap, and Nostalgia utilized controversial presale models to gather funds for their upcoming tokens.
On March 18, a pseudonymous crypto investor expressed concern over excessive risk-taking in memecoin purchases, highlighting the term “apeing” to describe buying tokens based on hype rather than research.
The launch of Book of Meme, which employed a controversial presale model, catalyzed the recent surge in interest in this fundraising approach.
Darkfarms1, a pseudonymous artist, initiated BOME on March 14, starting at a valuation of roughly $4 million. Surprisingly, within 56 hours, BOME surged over 36,000%, reaching a peak market capitalization of $1.45 billion.
A report by Lookonchain on March 17 revealed that a crypto investor named Sundayfunday. sol turned an initial investment of 420.69 SOL, valued at $72,000, into $32 million within 72 hours following BOME’s launch.
During a “pre-sale,” crypto investors transferred a specific amount of cryptocurrency to a wallet address, receiving a proportional distribution of tokens upon the token’s launch.
While “pre-sales” garnered popularity among crypto investors, they also carried high risks of scams and fraud, with no guarantee of receiving tokens in exchange for the cryptocurrency sent to a pre-sale wallet address.
Onchain sleuth, Zach tweeted on X(formerly twitter) “I was interested to see how much SOL has been sent as a result of the presale meta and calculated >655,000 SOL ($122.5M) raised from 27 presales”.
He added ” To put this even more info perspective for people not following crypto, these presales have all happened since March 12″.
According to Ethereum educator Anthony Sassano, sending money to an unknown wallet address in exchange for tokens was considered unwise.
“2 years later and everyone is right back to bidding ponzis. People can do what they want with their money but sending money to a ‘memecoin presale’ that has a 99.9% chance of rugging is just dumb as hell.”
The trend of memecoin investments expanded beyond the crypto community, and one person reportedly earned approximately $39,000 from a memecoin associated with entrepreneur David Sacks after it became controversial.
Following Elon Musk’s tweet “Ok fine, I will buy ur coin” to All In podcast host Jason Calacanis, the value of the JASON coin surged, allowing a 1 SOL investment to be sold for 200 SOL.
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