ZAP // Drypdesigns; Khakimullin / Depositphotos
In less than 10 minutes, an American teenager made a small fortune selling a memecoin that he had created as a joke. Os tradersfeeling deceived, began to react violently. Then they took revenge…
On the night of November 19th, the artistic consultant Adam Biesk was finishing work at his home in California when he heard a conversation between his wife and son, who had just come downstairs.
The son, a kid in his early teens, said he had made a lot of money with a cryptocurrency that he himself had created.
Initially, Biesk ignored the fact. He knew his son was playing with cryptocurrencies, but having made a small fortune before going to bed was far-fetched. “We didn’t really believe it“, says Biesk.
But when the phone started ringing nonstop and the woman was inundated with angry messages on Instagram, Biesk realized that his son was telling the truth — although not the full story, says .
In the early evening, at 7:48 p.m., the son had launched a billion units of a new cryptocurrency into the cryptocurrency market — a memecoin which he named Gen Z Quant.
At the same time, invested around 350 dollars (330 euros) to buy 51 million tokens — about 5% of the available amount — for yourself.
He then started doing a live broadcast on , the website he used to launch the coin. As people tuned in to see what the teen was up to, started buying Gen Z Quantwhich caused a sharp rise in the value of memecoin.
At around 7:56 p.m., eight minutes lateros tokens that the teenager had bought with his own currency were worth almost 30,000 dollars — something like 28.000 euros.
What he did next caused chaos: immediately raised all the money — a transaction so large that it provoked a abrupt drop in value of the new cryptocurrency.
“It can’t be. Who****! F*** you!“, he said, turning his two middle fingers towards the webcam, with his tongue sticking out of his mouth. “F***ing hell! Thanks for the twenty flocks“. The expression “trying” usually refers to a place, usually an abandoned house, where illegal drugs are traded.
For an ordinary person, all of this may seem impossible. But in the domain of memecoinsa type of cryptocurrency without any purpose or utility apart from financial speculation, it is relatively routine. Although many people lose money, there are those who win a lot — and quickly.
In this case, Biesk’s son appears to have done what is known as “soft rug pull“, in which someone creates a new token of cryptocurrency, promotes it online, and then sells all its holdings — either quickly, or over time – causing a drop in its value.
These actions occupy a gray area from a legal point of viewsay the lawyers, but are condemned in the cryptosphere as being, at the very least, ethically dubious.
After abandoning Gen Z Quant, Biesk’s son did the same thing with two more coins — one called “Im Sorry” and another called “My Dog Lucy” — bringing your earnings to more than 50,000 dollarsabout 47,000 euros.
The community reaction was swift and fierce. A torrent of insults and threats of traders who had purchased the memecoin and felt deceived, they started coming to the Pump.Fun chat.
“You f***ing crook“, wrote one user. Shortly afterwards, the names and photographs of Biesk, his son and other family members started circulating on X/Twitter. “Our phone started blowing up. It was phone call after phone call,” says Biesk. “It was a very scary situation“.
A few hours later, an X/Twitter account with the name of Biesk’s son made a post with a apology. “I apologize for Quant, I didn’t know I would receive so much money. Please don’t write to my parents, I’ll pay you“, the post reads. But Biesk claims the account is not managed by his son.
Although alarmed by the backlash, Biesk is impressed by the entrepreneurial spirit and son’s technical ability. “In fact, this is a kind of sophisticated trading platform,” he says. “It’s obvious he taught himself“.
Nonetheless, the revenge of traders began to reach evil refinements: they continued to buy Gen Z Quant, increasing the price of the currency — which reached a value much higher than the level at which Biesk’s son had sold his tokens.
At its peak value, around 3am the following morning, the currency had a theoretical total value of 72 million dollars — 68 million euros; you tokens that the teenager initially had would be worth more than 2.8 million at the time of euros.
At this point, although the initial frenzy of transactions has subsided, tokens of Gen Z Quant are still worth twice the amount the teenager received with his soft rug pull.
“No end, many people ended up making money with his coin. But for us, caught in the middle, there was a lot of emotion,” says Biesk. “The reaction online was so frightening that the realization that he had made money was tempered by the fact that people got angry and started bullying.”
Biesk says he has limited knowledge of cryptocurrencies, but sees little difference between what his son did and bet on the stock market or in a casino: some have to lose for others to profit.
Memecoins have existed since 2013, the year in which the Dogecoin — the famous cryptocurrency.
In the following years, some breeders tried to replicate Dogecoin’s successtaking advantage of popular Internet memes, but the cost and complexity of their creation limited the number of memecoins that actually reached the market.
These two factors were, however, eliminated from the equation in Januarywith the launch of Pump.Funwhich allows people to launch new memecoins instantly, at no cost. Since then, millions of exclusive coins have been released onto the market through the platform.
Pump.Fun offers a safest way to trade memecoinsstandardizing the underlying code, which prevents programmers from creating malicious mechanisms to steal funds — the so-called “hard rug pull“.
However, the platform has found that it is impossible to protect users from a soft rug pull as Biesk’s son starred.
While the platform gives users access to information that helps assess risk, such as the ratio of a currency belonging to a small group of big holdersas soft rug pulls are difficult to avoid by technical means.
“The overwhelming majority of new crypto tokens entering the market are frauds in one way or anotherdesigned expressly to squeeze money out of buyers, not to maintain sustained value over the long term,” he tells Wired Gone Ben-Natanfounder of crypto security company Blockaid.
“But now that the trade in memecoins became popular all over the world, There’s no way to put the genie back in the bottle“, knee Ben-Natan.
