Epik Duck: From Joke to $25 Million Solana Meme Coin

“I’m sitting right here going, ‘What the hell has lawful took exclaim?’” Anderson, better known by his crypto moniker Mando, told Decrypt.

The absurd legend of the asset in quiz, a Solana meme coin called “Epik Duck,” has bellow resonance in crypto on the brand new moment—one in which a meme coin frenzy has resuscitated prolonged-sagging enthusiasm all the contrivance via the industry, but also threatened to notify it with a bare gain of gambling that generally lacks any pretense of technological progress or utility.

Closing month, all the contrivance via a weekly podcast he hosts with one other crypto influencer, Keyboard Monkey, Mando started riffing about making his maintain meme coin. In contemporary months, meme-impressed crypto tokens gain risen from worthlessness to multi-billion dollar valuations.

It old to be that meme cash—first created as jokes poking enjoyable on the sheer volume of worthless, hole projects flooding the crypto industry—required some amount of technical prowess to make and launch. Nonetheless even that barrier has fallen away: Products and providers like Pump.enjoyable now permit customers to generate new meme cash on Solana in seconds, without writing a single line of code, for a few dollars’ price of SOL.

While recording his live podcast, Mando logged onto Pump.enjoyable and chose an image of a accepted meme of his: the Epik Duck, a Roblox persona that resurfaced as a viral shaggy dog story on Twitter in 2021. Mando titled his new coin “Epik Duck,” and filled in the meme’s pre-present tagline: “The Epik Duck is coming.” He then paid 4 SOL to launch the token—extra than wished—and clicked “launch.” The total part took less than two minutes.

Epik Duck straight went viral, in fragment on legend of of Mando’s podcast listeners, who jumped on the token. Within 10 minutes, the coin reached a market capitalization of $1 million. Within an hour, it surpassed $25 million.

The 4 SOL Mando had old to launch Epik Duck? That sum, firstly price about $740, bought the influencer 15% of his maintain token provide—a gain quick price $3.75 million.

That’s when a ridiculous exclaim of affairs quick obtained loads less silly, as Mando tells it. Within hours, the token’s market cap plummeted back all of the vogue down to $2 million. Within the midst of, many Epik Duck holders gained and misplaced a entire bunch of thousands of bucks. Mando says he moved to burn his maintain tokens, panicked that folks would bag the coarse thought about his intentions.

“I’m not going to bag canceled for this,” Mado talked about he told himself on the time. “I didn’t desire folks to voice I would possibly perchance perhaps also made cash off this, that I planned to. It’d lawful long gone absolutely insane.”

What had started as a shaggy dog story quick morphed into something extra serious: a multi-million dollar enterprise with thousands of holders, and Mando quick and unwittingly in the CEO’s chair.

“From then on, it turned a popularity part,” Mando talked about. “I was a man on a mission to attain this work.”

Nonetheless what, precisely, does it mean to attain a meme coin work? Unlike assorted arguably worthless sources floating around the cryptosphere, meme cash, by self-definition, abolish not gain any motive. Their entire utility used to be once bringing up, as meta-commentary, crypto’s lack of utility.

Mando sees things in another case—but he’s not your moderate vendor. The crypto influencer previously labored at Barclays and Goldman Sachs trading distressed and excessive-yield bonds sooner than emptying his and his companion’s financial savings accounts in 2021 to have 80 Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs. (He ended up promoting them for 700% revenue.)

To Mando, in their entire absence of any pretense of which formula, meme cash are the purest gain of forex.

“We all imagine in the dollar. It is a meme,” Mando talked about. “We all imagine in Bitcoin—it is a meme.”

“Meme cash, for me, are crypto in its purest gain,” he continued. “Meme cash are a wobble bustle in believing in the intrinsic worth of something.”

Thus, making Epik Duck work used to be lawful like making the leisure work, in an worldwide bereft of pure worth. It used to be lawful a sport of convincing folks.

So Mando started a web sites for Epik Duck, alongside with a Twitter legend and Telegram channel—after which a Chinese language Telegram channel and WeChat legend. He hired moderators for his social media operations, and he pushed Epik Duck as not easy as he would possibly perchance perhaps also. He talked about he barely sleeps this point to day as the Duck extra and extra dominates his lifestyles.

The work’s had combined results. While the token’s dropped off a stunning bit since closing month, some folks light imagine that Epik Duck has worth; or on the very least, some folks light imagine that assorted folks imagine it has worth. Since falling from its $25 million high, the coin light retains a $12 million market cap at writing, per CoinGecko.

Within the interval in-between, Mando has repurchased an undisclosed sum of the token—mainly, he says, to pay exchanges and market makers and fund neighborhood rewards programs. He says he owns someplace between 3% and 5% of the token’s provide.

He’s also invested, alongside with his industry partners, in Pump.enjoyable, praising the Epik Duck saga as proof of the protocol’s democratizing doable to permit any crypto client to—like him—gain something out of nothing.

No longer all gaze Pump.enjoyable’s ascendancy so positively. Closing month, a high govt at enterprise capital firm Andreessen Horowitz derided the brand new explosion of meme coin period as “undermining the prolonged-term vision of crypto” by turning the industry into “a unhealthy on line casino.”

“This deeply impacts adoption, laws/authorized pointers, and builder conduct,” the govt., Eddy Lazzarin, talked about. “I gaze the pain each day. You would possibly light too.”

On Thursday, a disgruntled old Pump.enjoyable employee hacked the protocol in a $2 million exploit that brought on the positioning to temporarily shut down. The hacker later talked about he had supposed to “abolish” Pump.enjoyable with the attack.

“It’s inadvertently harm folks for a truly very prolonged time,” the old employee later talked about, when explaining his motivations for attacking the positioning.

On Friday, over 23,000 new fungible tokens were created on the Solana community, an all-time day to day legend. Appropriate months ago, that figure hovered, on moderate, at around 300 per day.

Edited by Andrew Hayward