The developer of the Slerf memecoin inadvertently burned both the liquidity pool and the 500 million tokens designated for pre-sale participants in a botched launch today. The project had successfully raised over $10 million during its pre-sale.

Over the weekend, the project was one of the numerous Solana-based memecoins that had attracted millions from crypto enthusiasts through pre-sale initiatives.

During this period, Dekadente, an unknown NFT artist, raised over $30 million worth of SOL in the pre-sale of a memecoin called Smole. Likewise, another NFT artist named Kero amassed over $10 million for their memecoin, NAP.

Crypto researcher 0xGumshoe revealed that the community had collectively invested approximately $100 million in Solana memecoin pre-sales.

Furthermore, the memecoin frenzy propelled Solana decentralized exchange volumes to record highs, and the popularity of the blockchain on Google has now surpassed that of Ethereum.

What is pre-sale?

Usually, pre-sale involves investors sending crypto to a designated wallet address in exchange for a weighted distribution of tokens once the token launches. However, participation in a pre-sale doesn’t guarantee token allocation.

The popularity of pre-sales surged notably following the unexpected success of The Book of Meme (BOME) coin, which experienced a remarkable value increase of over 1,000%. This surge led to significant listings on various exchanges, including Binance.

As of press time, BOME has a fully diluted market capitalization of approximately $1 billion.

Despite the apparent success of the pre-sale model, Ethereum expert Anthony Sassano described it as a “bidding ponzis.”

He said:

“People can do what they want with their money but sending money to a “memecoin presale” that has a 99.9% chance of rugging is actually just dumb as hell.”

Grifters take advantage

Unfortunately, the uncertainty of the pre-sales approach has made it an attractive avenue for fraudsters to exploit unsuspecting investors.

On-chain crypto sleuth ZachXBT has called attention to accounts of “grifters” who are swooping in to take advantage of the community. Onchain data shows that one of the accounts he flagged raised around 4,935.55 SOL worth approximately $1 million for a yet-to-be-released memecoin.