The market is sluggish, and chaos abounds. How outrageous have recent memes been?
"Send ETH to me," earned a million dollars in one day.Author: Loopy Lu, ODAILY
This week, chasing memes and "shitcoins" continues to be the main theme of the retail market. With a new hot meme coin emerging almost every day, meme coins are rapidly born, become popular, and then fade away.
On Monday, Bitcoin peaked above $28,400, marking the highest point for BTC this week. It then fell again over the next few days, remaining in a range-bound fluctuation. The overall market sentiment is low, lacking innovative hotspots, and ordinary investors mostly hope to find the next PEPE.
Of course, for the vast majority, it is just a bubble, a dream.
WFAI: Rumored Insider Trading, KOLs and Community Promotion on Time
On Tuesday, on-chain information showed that DWF Labs purchased WFAI tokens. Once this action was discovered, it quickly spread across various communities.
Why is this news so closely watched? As a market maker and investment institution, DWF Labs typically does not engage much with ordinary retail investors, but in recent months, due to its frequent high-profile actions in the secondary market and substantial short-term investment returns, it has rapidly gained fame and sparked controversy. (Previously, Odaily had written an introduction to this institution.)
In this operation, DWF Labs invested 20 ETH to purchase WFAI, and the WFAI token quickly became a new meme star in the market, experiencing a rapid surge.
In just one day, WFAI rose from around $0.0000001 to about $0.0000006, achieving an increase of approximately 6 times in one day. The rapid price surge and institutional backing made it a hot topic, attracting more investors who began to enter the market, hoping to create the next meme legend.
However, things soon took a turn.
Some rumors circulating in the community questioned whether WFAI was a scam "insider trading" project. The day before DWF's purchase of WFAI, some community members were already spreading news that DWF had quietly acquired WFAI.
Additionally, on the evening of the 29th, several KOLs simultaneously released information about the token. For a new meme project that had gone unnoticed, this raised suspicions about the existence of a team behind the project. Twitter users also discovered that WFAI's holdings were highly concentrated.
According to the tokenomics published by WFAI, 95% of the supply would be allocated to LPs. However, shortly after WFAI went live, four new wallets spent a total of 14.4 ETH in four transactions to buy up to 647 trillion WFAI, accounting for about 83.2% of the total supply.
But soon, the project team responded.
On Wednesday, the WFAI project team stated that the contract deployer had blacklisted some profit addresses, including the top four addresses that purchased WFAI and 11 addresses to which they were linked, totaling 649 trillion WFAI, accounting for 83.54% of the total supply. Furthermore, the trust score on DEXTools rose from very low to very high within a few hours.
As of now, WFAI has dropped about 30% from its peak.
LOVE: So Love Will Disappear, Right?
WFAI is just one example of the recent craze for shitcoins, and the airdrop discussion sparked by LOVE has also been a dramatic topic this week.
Earlier this week, browsing Twitter, it seemed like the entire internet was reaping LOVE airdrops. The LOVE airdrop once again attracted a frenzy from opportunists, and its loose airdrop policy even allowed some players to accumulate an uncountable number of addresses in one go.
At the optimal price, one account received airdrops worth about $150, while the only cost incurred was just a transaction gas fee.
Unlike many anonymous meme coins, LOVE was issued by Twitter KOL @M4573RCH. On May 20, he tweeted: "No pre-sale, no public sale, please send 0 ETH to the specified address, do not send any funds." This was also the initial way to acquire LOVE; as long as you initiated a 0-value transfer to the specified address within the limited time, you could qualify for the airdrop by only paying the gas fee.
The mechanism design of LOVE has also been praised by some, as the token has a built-in fission attribute.
If users want to interact with the LOVE contract, they must hold at least one LOVE in their wallet. This means that if you want to buy the token, you must first seek one LOVE from existing LOVE holders. To help users solve this problem, some CEXs launched LOVE spot trading on the first day.
Due to its unique mechanism and airdrop effect, LOVE quickly became a new meme hotspot.
Just as everyone was still immersed in the joy of the airdrop, the project team dropped a "bomb," catching the opportunists off guard.
On just the second day of the airdrop, on-chain data showed that many addresses that had accumulated a large amount of LOVE airdrops were blacklisted by the project team.
After a very brief period of euphoria, what happened to the price of LOVE?
According to DEXScreener, LOVE's current price has fallen to less than one-tenth of its peak on the first day of trading, and its price is quite dismal.
LOVE may not disappear, but it is likely to go to zero.
Me, PAULY, Send Money
Of course, LOVE's short-lived explosion may just be a coincidence of a meme. Even more astonishing is that LOVE has pioneered a new meme model—"0 Transfer" mode.
On the first day of LOVE's launch, a "0 Transfer" meme coin appeared on the ARB chain, similar to LOVE, where users need to initiate a 0 ARB transfer to a specified address to qualify for the airdrop. Within just two days, multiple clones of 0 Transfer have emerged.
Among them, the most exaggerated is the unnamed project initiated by PAULY, the founder of NotLarvaLabs.
NotLarvaLabs briefly gained popularity during the last bull market's NFT frenzy, and its Crypto Punk clone project, Crypto Phunk, once sparked heated discussions.
While other projects were still stuck on "0 Transfer," PAULY posted a tweet, imitating LOVE's transfer, directly calling on netizens to "send ETH" to him, and not a 0-value transfer.
On-chain data shows that in just one day, PAULY surprisingly received over $1 million in Ethereum.
As of the publication of this article, his designated address has received about 9,800 transfers, totaling 663 ETH, worth approximately $1.26 million.
However, PAULY has not provided any explanation, planning, or commitments regarding this project, and we don't even know the project's name. The crazy meme market is becoming increasingly difficult to understand.
Remember back in early May when the emergence of BRC-20 created a new hotspot in the market? The meme shitcoins have been taking turns from ERC to BRC, and after just a week of madness, the meme trend has plummeted from its peak.
Just like every previous round of altcoin seasons, the script is similar; alongside the explosive rise of memes, numerous "rug pulls" and scams are continuously occurring. Since this week, popular memes have rapidly emerged and faded, with their lifespans becoming shorter and shorter. When investors participate in meme speculation, they must be wary of various risks. Highly uncontrollable and lacking basic information, memes make authenticity and security even more unpredictable.
