At least 12 Solana presale memecoins have been “completely abandoned” in the last 30 days after raising a combined $26.7 million from investors, according to figures shared by independent blockchain sleuth ZachXBT.
In an April 21 post to X, ZachXBT highlighted 12 Solana memecoin projects that raised funds through the controversial presale method, many of which have since plunged significantly since launch, and one which appears not to have launched any token at all.
According to ZachXBT, the most costly “abandoned” presale project was a memecoin dubbed ‘I like this coin’ which sported the ticker LIKE.
The project’s pseudonymous founder pokeee.eth raised a staggering 52,220 Solana (SOL) ($7.7 million at current prices) for the memecoin and launched the coin on March 17 with a market capitalization of $577 million, however, the meme coin’s value plunged rapidly, falling more than 90% in the first 8 hours.
As of the time of publication, LIKE is down 99.2% from its launch price. Notably, the memecoin’s official X account hasn’t made a single new post since March 31 — and pokeee.eth hasn’t mentioned the coin since then either.
The second-largest alleged abandoned presale is for a token called MOONKE.
Launched by another pseudonymous founder RockyXBT on March 20 to an outsized valuation of nearly $500 million, MOONKE soon charted a similar path to LIKE, plummeting more than 99% from its launch price in a matter of hours.
One project that raised 4,567 SOL ($812,000 at current prices) never even launched a token.
Cointelegraph contacted both Pokeee and RockyXBT for comment but did not receive a response by the time of publication.
Related: What are memecoins good for? Social signaling, says Avalanche founder
The market’s enthusiasm for memecoins has dwindled somewhat in recent weeks, with several of the larger Solana-based memecoins including dogwifhat (WIF) sliding more than 40% since April 1.
At the time, last month’s memecoin frenzy saw several market pundits draw comparisons to Ethereum initial coin offering (ICO) era boom of 2017 where hundreds of crypto projects raised millions of dollars but ultimately most failed to deliver.
One of the most notable Solana pre-sale debacles in recent months came in March, when the developer of a memecoin called Slerf claimed to have accidentally burned the entire pre-sale allocation of the memecoin SLERF in a “fat finger” burn error.
Despite the Slerf dev burning a staggering total of 535,000 SOL (worth around $10 million at the time) the coin soon quickly became a cult favorite among memecoin investors, who rallied behind the token and saw it rally to a peak of around $750 million market cap.
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