The debut of the anti-sniping meme flopped, sparking controversy over the challenge to Pump.fun's SICK

Authors: Joyce, Jack, BlockBeats

After several days of anticipation, the meme coin SICK, featuring a novel Stake-to-meme concept and an anti-sniping function, went live last night. Initially, it delayed its launch, and after opening, the community found that the claimed anti-sniping mechanism was "completely ineffective," with most profits going to snipers who entered immediately after the launch.

Just 2 minutes after SICK launched, its market cap surged to around $5 million, and within 20 minutes, SICK's trading volume reached $3.3 million, with a peak market cap of $6.8 million, before rapidly collapsing, currently down 60% from its high. In a subsequent explanation, the official Sick Twitter account stated that the anti-sniping feature failed to trigger due to technical issues.

What is SICK?

In the past two days, Sick on SOL has gained rapid attention in the meme community, with its NFT minting completed in the form of blinks on August 23, and the floor price tripling by September 1. The token SICK, originally scheduled to launch at 11 PM on September 3, became the focus of meme players.

$SICK is a token launched through a platform called Moonkebiz, representing the project Sick on SOL. $SICK raised initial liquidity by minting NFTs (Sick of rug), using the funds raised as the initial liquidity pool for the meme coin. Moonkebiz employs a "stake-to-meme" mechanism, where stakers are NFT holders. As the liquidity pool of the meme coin increases, the shares of stakers will unlock, and NFT holders will receive corresponding amounts of SOL and meme coins of equivalent value.

Additionally, Moonkebiz has anti-sniping measures in place to prevent large-scale token purchases. Within the first 90 seconds of the launch, if more than 10% of the circulating supply is purchased, a portion of the tokens stored in the smart contract will be added to the liquidity pool, preventing snipers from holding excessive shares of the token. The additional income generated by this mechanism will also be distributed to NFT holders.

Experience Tutorial

On Moonkebiz's official Twitter, it introduces its mission to revolutionize the rampant meme rug phenomenon on Pump.fun. Upon entering the Moonkebiz homepage, the first thing you see is its slogan: "A meme launch platform without rugs on Solana."

In the gameplay introduction, Moonkebiz replaces the bounding curve phase that meme releases typically undergo with "crowdfunding." Currently, users cannot freely create tokens on Moonkebiz and must DM the official account to obtain creation permissions; SICK is the first token on Moonkebiz.

The Situation is Grim

Last night, a BlockBeats editor also waited for the launch moment of SICK. The announced launch time was 11 PM, but according to Dexcreener and GMGN, the actual contract launch time was 11:13:59 PM. Dexcreener data showed that just two minutes after launch, SICK's market cap surged to around $5.5 million. After that, SICK rapidly dropped 37% within 4 minutes, then began to rise again for 13 minutes, doubling in price. At this point, only 20 minutes had passed since the launch.

Left image: SICK's performance within 8 minutes of launch; Right image: SICK's performance within three hours of launch

After reaching a market cap of $6.8 million, SICK began to plummet, currently with a market cap of $2.49 million, down over 60% from its peak. According to responses from meme community players, most of those who profited from SICK were traders who quickly bought in within the first minute of launch. For example, a sniper wallet address starting with CZaHE bought $44,000 worth of SICK at the moment of launch and sold all their chips in 7 transactions within the next minute, making a profit of $100,000.

Meme player Mikong shared his trading experience on Twitter, stating that after the launch time passed but the token contract was still not announced, his team discovered a frequently trading address 2 hbRbjgYXYFtDCPKDZngY1Vzy3RdoajwaQziZHByp7mk associated with Sick's official TG group. They manually bought in just seconds after the contract address was launched, doubling their investment.

Left image: @mekongeth, the SICK contract seen at 22:53; Right image: SICK official released the token contract at 23:14

"After the scheduled launch time was delayed, many FUD messages started to circulate, and we canceled our pre-launch sniper bot. In hindsight, the anti-sniping mechanism of SICK hardly worked. I regret not launching the sniper bot," Mikong wrote.

In response to community doubts, SICK officials explained that the technical issues causing transaction failures related to rate limits led to the anti-sniping feature not triggering.

SICK officials also pointed out on Twitter that the meme board tool GMGN marked the snipers as developer alt accounts, hoping they would revise the markings, and complained that the snipers' trading records were too numerous, scrolling through 250 pages without end. "Unfortunately, the activation speed of the anti-sniping mode was not fast enough, but honestly, this was still the fairest token launch ever (despite the lack of anti-sniping)."

GMGN stated that the determination of dev alt accounts was based on the traders in the first few blocks at launch. Records show that four sniper addresses were identified as dev alt accounts, with their profit multiples on SICK ranging from 100% to 300%. If ordinary traders can learn anything, it's that they should remain vigilant not only about the visions painted by the project parties but also about discerning the gameplay rules set by the project parties.