Life comes at you fast. Memecoin cycles… even faster.
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Such was the gwei on a bloody Thursday in the memecoin trenches. The trend of the day was Changpeng Zhao’s dog. The former Binance CEO said on X that he would tweet its name and photo, knowing full well that the simple act would fuel opportunistic people to create memecoins.
Many crypto personalities have unwittingly seen their pooches turned into tokens. Seldom do they engage with – let alone encourage – the trend. CZ was different. He promised to release the alpha, but openly questioned how traders would know which memecoin was the “official” token to buy.
Nevermind that. At 11:12 AM New York time, CZ revealed he had a Belgian Malinois named “Broccoli.” In the same post he vowed not to release his own Broccoli coin, but teased he might trade the successful ones, and the BNB Foundation might lend some promotion, too.
There would be no bountiful Broccoli on Thursday.
By 11:15, oodles of tokens carrying the ticker BROCCOLI were trading on BNB Chain and Solana. Some of them soared out of the gate, seemingly reaching billion dollar-plus market caps as traders jockeyed for the predominant coin. With no apparent victor consolidating the bids, they came crashing down just as quickly.
The sudden spike and immediate reversal underscored the dangers of playing in the unregulated, lawless and morality-free memecoin economy. No one profits more than insiders.
Take the wallet that starts with 0x392eb. It spent less than $1000 to create the token “CZ’s Dog (Broccoli)” immediately after CZ’s tweet; it awarded itself over 110 million of the asset at mint, becoming its single-largest holder. Two minutes later it started selling.
Barely 20 minutes after launching Broccoli, 0x392eb had unloaded its entire stack for $6.5 million in profits. Its sell pressure helped crush the buyers rushing into the token on the belief (or rather desperate hope) that it would soar up only.
The token saw over 30,000 buyers and sellers Thursday execute nearly 100,000 transactions. Some early actors made millions, according to DEXscreener, but the winners’ tail quickly diminished. The 100th most successful Broccoli trader made a comparatively paltry $20,000 profit.
Anyone who bought this Broccoli in its first hour – the height of the craze – and held, is down big time. The token had a market cap of around $50 million at press time, well below its highs.
While 0x392eb was unloading their Broccoli as fast as they could, CZ spoke up:
“Let the best meme coin in the community win,” he posted on X, reiterating once again he would not personally pick a winner. He seemingly acknowledged in his post that this flavor of memecoin trading was a major gamble.
What he didn’t acknowledge in his post was the deck being so heavily stacked against traders. When one trader makes millions on a coin simply by creating it, giving it to themselves and selling, their profits only come because other people are willing to buy. That the creator is selling troves makes the coin’s success all the more unlikely.
What happened with 0x392eb’s Broccoli played out in similar fashion with other tokens that tried to capture the attention CZ spawned, further underscoring how the disjointed effort failed to pick a winner.
The escapade spawned dozens of posts on X lampooning people who lost money on Broccoli. It also sparked some soul-searching about the depressed state of memecoin trading.
