Solana’s meme coin season hit its peak a month ago, but the trend seemingly refuses to die elsewhere.
The launch of a new ‘FOMO’ meme coin on Coinbase’s Ethereum layer 2, Base, shows many are still willing to blindly throw money at dubious projects.
The project, Father Of Meme Origin (FOMO), is styled on the likeness of Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene, in which the term ‘meme’ was coined.
The FOMO team has been accused of bad faith around the launch and botching the distribution of tokens. Despite raising over $15 million via ‘presale,’ the team allegedly supplied less than 10% of the funds raised to the token’s liquidity pool.
Typically, token presales are designed to secure liquidity for trading of the token upon launch, with buyers (and team members) assigned tokens when deployed.
Others accused the team of ‘sniping’ its own launch (frontrunning other buyers) and adding a hefty sell tax to the token, raising $1 million.
Despite the criticisms, FOMO has already been listed on Poloniex and LBank with a MEXC listing scheduled for tomorrow.
The project had previously been endorsed by the influential Base-based BasedBrett account, who deleted their post in response to the criticism.
The team referred to concerns in a recent post saying, “The journey to the moon is fraught with immense challenges”. It has also responded to critics directly, stating that the remainder of the funds will be used for “the overall health of the project.”
At the time of writing, FOMO is currently down approximately 90% from launch, according to on-chain trading data.
Read more: $10M accidentally burned as Solana memecoin craze continues
Meme coin mania
Base now appears to be the home of the bulk of meme coin activity, spurred on by the drastic drop in transaction fees brought about by the introduction of ‘blobs’ in Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade.
Solana’s memecoin season hit fever pitch weeks ago. The FOMO culminated in a ‘presale’ frenzy in which, by simply tweeting an address, well-known accounts were able to raise millions in minutes, with little to no accountability.
Since then, Solana’s hype has dropped off significantly, plagued by criticisms of dropped transactions as activity peaked.
SOL is currently down roughly 25% from its recent high on April 1, according to data from CoinMarketCap.
