Memecoin developers rugpulled over $26m in pre-sales on Solana amid March’s craze

A recent estimate reveals that more than a dozen memecoin pre-sales on Solana have been abandoned soon after raising funds.

More than a dozen of the memecoin pre-sales on Solana, which collectively generated over $26 million over the past month, have been abandoned, suggesting a potentially larger scale of scam activity amid investors’ eagerness to capitalize on March’s memecoin craze.

According to recent calculations done by blockchain sleuth ZachXBT, the identified set of pre-sale memecoins allocated over 180,650 SOL tokens, equivalent to approximately $28 million at the time of reporting.

“Would avoid any future projects launched by these founders.”

ZachXBT

Among the identified pre-sales, one user, going by the alias @pokeepandaa, raised over 52,000 SOL for the LIKE token, representing nearly 30% of the total identified memecoin pre-sales that were abandoned post-fundraising, according to ZachXBT’s calculations.

Starting from mid-March, it’s understood that more than 35 memecoin pre-sales have taken place in the Solana ecosystem, amassing over $150 million worth of SOL. However, not all of these projects followed the trajectory of the latest identified cohort, ZachXBT added. In a follow-up X post, the blockchain sleuth also noted that the same trend can now be observed on Base, a layer-2 solution developed by Coinbase.

As crypto.news reported earlier, the surge in memecoin prices has prompted the deployment of trading bots on the Solana network, aiming for arbitrage trades, which, when unavailable, result in failed transactions. Eventually, those failed transactions, labeled as “bot spam,” constituted the vast majority of the failed transactions on Solana, as per Helis CEO Mert Mumtaz.