In this article we tell the crazy story of Slerf, a sloth-themed memecoin on the Solana blockchain, and the “accidental” mistake of its founder who, right after raising funds from a pre-sale token sale of 10 million dollars, burned all the resources intended for investors.
Despite this setback, Slerf has received an extraordinary media attention managing to reach a trading volume of 2.7 billion dollars in the first days of trading of the cryptocurrency, more than what was recorded by all decentralized exchanges on the Ethereum blockchain.
Thanks to the mistake (or clever move) of its main developer, the memecoin went from an initial price of 0.02 dollars to 0.76 dollars in just one day, for an increase of 38X.
All the details below.
Summary
The incredible story of the memecoin Slerf: founder accidentally burns 10.8 million dollars of pre-sale investors
Slerf, a new memecoin based on Solana that features the image of a sloth, has caught the attention of the entire crypto world after its founder (aka developer) managed to make a multi-million dollar mistake.
It all started when, on March 18, immediately after concluding a public pre-sale of 10.8 million dollars with the new SLERF tokens that would be used as a reward for investors, the project founder announced that he had “accidentally” burned the LP tokens representing the on-chain liquidity provided and the tokens intended for pre-sale buyers.
These resources are considered lost forever because they were sent by mistake, in an attempt to clean up their wallet from all the scam tokens sent by external users, to a wallet whose developer does not know the private keys.
By doing so, in addition to sending all the investors’ money into nothingness, Slerf automatically lost 50% of its maximum supply.
A similar event in the memecoin sector occurred at the dawn of the success of Shiba Inu, when its lead developer Ryoshi sent 50% of the supply to Vitalik Buterin, with the intention of pushing up the price of the cryptocurrency (as actually happened).
Even in this case, we can imagine that the alleged “error” was previously orchestrated only to benefit from greater attention in a market frenzy fueled by enthusiasm, especially in the context of Solana, and attract potential buyers.
Success is huge right from the start: in just 24 hours of trading SLERF recorded an increase in its value of about 38X the listing price and an incredible trading volume of 2.7 billion dollars, even higher than the entire volume traded in the decentralized markets of Ethereum.
In the first 2 and a half hours of listing, buyers pushed the price of SLERF up by 6500%, going from around 0.02 dollars to almost 1.4 dollars.
The founder of the project appeared visibly upset about the mistake, and was willing to organize a space X to discuss possible resolutions to repay the investors who were left holding the bag.
His own investment in the token was lost forever, fueling the (not very credible) narrative that the incident happened in good faith.
What is actually more likely, even if not empirically confirmable, is that it is a mere marketing strategy, created specifically to push the price of the token and reevaluate another purchase outside the pre-sale, whose value would have increased by several multipliers.
In this way, on one hand the developer has lost a significant amount of money (most of which did not belong to him) but on the other hand he has made a stellar profit.
A brilliant move of insider trading.
Solana community support for the Slerf incident
The only ones who have been burned by the Slerf incident are the pre-sale buyers who, despite having spent their SOL, did not receive any amount in the aforementioned memecoin.
To remedy the disaster, the Solana community has considered several possible compensation solutions, such as the creation of a new token, but all ideas have been rejected by the founder of the cryptographic project.
Instead, it was decided to create a dedicated wallet for donations to users who were burned by the pre-sale, from which the Slerf team does not have access as it is managed by a third-party independent.
However, the real support came from the Solana ecosystem, and more generally from the entire crypto world, in the days following the listing of the memecoin when several exchanges that had listed the token on their markets decided to donate the proceeds from the fees to the defrauded users.
Among these, the exchanges HTX (formerly Huobi Global), Bitget, and BingX stand out: it is still not clear how refunds will be made, but the CEOs of the platforms have revealed that new guidelines will be disclosed in the coming weeks.
Even Justin Sun, the famous billionaire owner of HTX and Tron, participated in the charity event to help cover the losses of investors.
Finally, another form of contribution has arrived in the same way in which the same cryptocurrency was conceived, namely in the form of memes!
Several users on X have shown their support to the users who were scammed, tweeting messages of support and attaching funny memes.
Even Leonidas, a prominent figure in the Ordinals field, joked about the incident by echoing the words of the Slerf developer (quote: Guys, i fucked up) immediately after sending an NFT “Runestone” to Satoshi Nakamoto’s wallet, commemorating the launch of the digital asset.
This market never ceases to amaze us.
