Over the past few weeks, Solana has been dominated by a series of quick celebrity-endorsed cash grabs, in a memecoin frenzy that refuses to run out of steam.
Kicked off by WIF, BONK, and a variety of political-themed tokens — which are generally down from their peaks in early spring — Solana’s meme coin launchpad pump.fun is still seeing plenty of action, raking in more fees than the entire Ethereum network earlier this week.
Read more: $10M accidentally burned as Solana memecoin craze continues
More recently, the focus has been on so-called ‘celebcoins,’ which may or may not be endorsed by their namesake. Caitlyn Jenner’s JENNER token began the trend before Iggy Azalea’s MOTHER reached a market cap of over $100 million. Other tokens were promoted via apparent hacks of celebrity social media accounts.
All this activity has eclipsed Solana’s once-promising offering of decentralized finance (DeFi) projects that include lending protocols, decentralized exchanges, and derivatives trading platforms.
Ignoring liquid staking platforms, which simply wrap staked SOL, the total value locked (TVL) of the top three in each of the above categories amounts to around $3.5 billion, according to data from DeFiLlama. The equivalent selection of protocols on Ethereum mainnet total over $25 billion in TVL.
Of the Solana-based examples, though, one protocol stands out in particular.
As noted by X (formerly Twitter) user YouAreMyYield, Solana’s third largest perps platform, 01 Exchange, is in fact a ‘dead’ project, despite still holding $43 million in TVL, mostly made up of neglected Alameda Research funds.
Read more: Solana ‘only’ down for 5 hours but that was plenty of time for memes
In a warning to users, the website’s banner reads ’01 Exchange was winded [sic.] down. Please withdraw your remaining assets. Try a few times if withdrawal doesn’t work first time.’
According to the pseudonymous investigator, the address still holds positions on 01 Exchange worth $38 million in staked mSOL, as well as 6.5 million USDC. YouAreMyYield explains, “The estate emptied the address in April ’23 by removing liquidity on stuff like Raydium and Atrix, but they forgot about the 01 balance.”
But it’s not just Alameda losing change down the back of the sofa.
Another of last cycle’s villains popped back into action when a three-year-old NFT bid from a Three Arrows Capital wallet was accepted earlier today.
Read more: 3AC founder Su Zhu says prison ‘good for you’ after four-month stay
The bid of 20 ETH (approximately $59,000 at the time of writing), made in August 2021, looks to be a further 20 ETH that won’t make it back to creditors, after Su and Davies’ spectacularly blew up their fund the following year.
