Is the launch of meme coin Slerf a marketing stunt?

Author: Tom Mitchelhill, CoinTelegraph; Compiled by: Deng Tong, Golden Finance

The $10 million mess involving the Solana-based Slerf (SLERF) memecoin may actually be acomplicated A marketing stunt—at least according to some bystanders who witnessed the disaster.

On March 18, the developers of the Slerf project attracted widespread attention after claiming to have accidentally burned a pre-sale allocation of 53,000 Solana SOL tokens intended to be airdropped to early investors.

The Slerf developer posted "oh fuck" on X after realizing his mistake, then explained 10 minutes later and wrote "I'm so sorry" in the post. Slerf's post went from apologetic to awed as the token's trading volume surged to over $2 billion in a matter of hours.

However, some skeptics point to several suspicious transactions as evidence that so-called false burns may have been deliberately used to attract attention—although much of this evidence is circumstantial .

Solana community developer Gary Henderson claimed that the Slerf burn appeared to have been tampered with, noting that the Slerf creator's wallet removed 1,050 SOL from the liquidity pool before the liquidity was burned.

Source: Gary Henderson

Henderson said this strongly suggestsSlerf development The person became aware of the imminent destruction of funds and decided to withdraw his funds early.

The Slerf developer responded and denied doing so intentionally, saying he "unintentionally" burned the tokens.

“This is true, but I have no intention of burning the airdropped tokens,” Slerf wrote in a March 19 post to X.

Wildcat creator Laurence Day also said that Slerf's burning was "almost certainly intentional" to create hype for the project.

He explained thatsomeone deposited $1.9 million into a liquidity pool shortly after the burn and sold it for $5 million, suggesting that insiders may have used the incident to profit from the hysteria. profit.

Day bSource: Laurence Day on Twitter

However, Slerf developers have repeatedly explained that the burning is “no joke” but the result of a simple “unintentional misclick” during the process of burning liquidity pools on a tool called the SOL Incinerator.

At X Space on March 18, the developer appeared to be in tears and reiterated that burning the pre-sale allocation was a stupid mistake.

Whether this failed launch was intentional or not, the project generated incredible attention on social media and in the market itself.

As of press time, Slerf has seen more than $3.2 billion in trading volume in the past 24 hours and is currently changing hands at $0.8349, with a total market capitalization of $432.3 billion.

Slerf's trading volume exceeded $3.2 billion in the past 24 hours. Source: Birdeye

It is worth noting that there is no guarantee that investors will actually receive tokens from the pre-sale, which is why the fundraising model is so popular among scammers and other fraudsters part of the reason.

In the past 72 hours, the Solana memecoin project raised more than $100 million through a presale.