Inside the 2024 Meme Coin Frenzy — Rug Pulls, Livestream Stunts and a Pump.fun Insider Heist

Meme coins, the breakout trade of March's crypto rally, have come roaring back, riding the wave of optimism around a potential Ethereum Spot ETF approval. Far from fading as a one-off speculative spike or a warning sign of a market top, the meme coin trend has proven to be a persistent and disruptive force in crypto.

The word "meme" itself comes from Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, where he used it to describe ideas or behaviors that spread through culture the way a virus spreads through a population. That framing fits crypto's meme coin scene uncomfortably well: the behavior spreads fast, and it spreads mostly through imitation.

The lengths people will go to for attention have escalated accordingly. In one widely circulated incident, a Solana meme coin developer arranged to have fireworks set off near him while covered in alcohol during a livestream meant to pump his token; he ended up hospitalized with third-degree burns. It's just one entry in a growing list of stunts that illustrate how far the meme coin craze has pulled parts of the crypto community.

(Reporting drawn in part from Decrypt, ZachXBT, Crypto.News, and Cointelegraph.)

01A platform built for speed

Crypto has always contained both serious builders working on genuine infrastructure and a much larger contingent chasing quick, high-variance gains — and the meme coin economy sits squarely in the second camp. Launching a token now takes almost no capital and no technical skill, which is precisely the point: anyone can create one and abandon it just as easily.

The dominant venue for this right now is pump.fun on Solana. Creating a token costs about $2 and requires no seed liquidity. The platform earns revenue through a 1% fee on swaps and a 2 SOL fee charged when a token's liquidity crosses the $69,000 threshold needed to graduate to Raydium. Pump.fun markets itself as rug-pull resistant, pointing to its no-presale, no-insider-allocation model, but traders still routinely lose money because creators are able to accumulate early positions and dump them once a token gains traction. The platform's code is closed-source and its API is restricted, yet that hasn't slowed adoption — users keep coming back for the chance of catching the next breakout token.

02When the money disappears

Well before this latest wave, ZachXBT had already compiled a list of Solana presale meme coins whose founders simply took the raised funds and vanished. If anything, that exposure did nothing to slow the trend — new cases kept surfacing.

The team behind a token called URF vanished within 24 hours, taking with it roughly 2,400 SOL (about $450,000) raised in the presale, funds that were reportedly then used to trade other meme tokens on Solana. A separate token, CONDOM, raised 4,965 SOL (around $906,000) in its presale before its team deleted the project's X account, which had accumulated more than 50,000 followers, some of them well-known figures.

Not every project that gets rugged stays dead, though. Catwifhat, which launched in December 2023, survived two separate rug pulls within its first twelve days. After the original developer dumped 20% of the token supply and crashed the price, a volunteer team stepped in to relaunch it — only for the project to get rugged again on Christmas Eve. The community rebuilt it a second time regardless.

03Stunts, gimmicks, and one very committed hot dog eater

Beyond straightforward rug pulls, some projects have leaned into spectacle. The token LIVEMOM was created by a teenager who used suggestive livestreams featuring his mother to draw in buyers before pulling the rug at a $300,000 valuation. The creator of the HANDS token claimed for a time that he was physically unable to rug the project because he had no hands — before revealing his hands at the token's price peak and cashing out.

One holder of the COST token has taken a different approach: he's eating a $1.50 Costco hot dog every day until the token's price matches that figure. He holds roughly $3,000 worth of the coin, meaning he'd need something like a 4,000% rally before the pledge pays off.

04The pump.fun insider job

Pump.fun itself became a victim on May 16, when it suffered an exploit worth roughly $1.9 million. According to reports, a former contractor named Jarett Dunn — known online as STACCoverflow — used privileged access left over from his time working with the platform to run a flash-loan attack, draining funds from a set of newly created meme coins over roughly 100 minutes.

In the aftermath, Dunn posted a series of emotional and erratic tweets referencing personal struggles and a stated desire to "change history." He was reportedly arrested and released on bail in the UK, and has since continued posting in ways that suggest, per some observers, he may not be done stirring up trouble while awaiting his court date.

05Celebrity endorsements and copycat launches

Separately, the meme coin space has continued to demonstrate why celebrity-backed tokens deserve skepticism, particularly around promoter Sahil Arora. Both Caitlyn Jenner and Rich the Kid have said publicly that they were caught up in pump-and-dump schemes tied to Arora. In a sequence that echoes the "Spider-Man pointing" meme, Arora reportedly launched an IGGY token referencing musician Iggy Azalea just hours before Azalea launched her own MOTHER token — with both projects later drawing scam allegations. Cointelegraph's Magazine separately obtained a price list allegedly circulated by Arora, showing celebrity and adult-film-star endorsement fees ranging from $6,000 to $315,000.

Pump.fun, for its part, has just rolled out livestreaming as a feature — a move some observers have greeted with unease given the platform's track record.

06The meme coin wave reaches Base

While Solana has absorbed most of the attention, Coinbase's layer-2 network Base has been quietly building scale, with plans to onboard as many as 100 million users. Launched in the latter part of last summer, Base already holds more than $1.7 billion in total value locked and has climbed into the top ten chains by that measure.

Growth has brought the same problems seen on Solana. An April investigation by Cointelegraph's Magazine found that roughly one in six new meme coins launched on Base qualified as scams, and that 91% carried some form of exploitable vulnerability. In mid-May, a new coin-launch platform called base.fun went live, letting anyone create and launch a token for under $1 in a single click. Its marketing promises no dev-owned allocations and no hidden fees, claims tokens launched through it can't be rugged, and offers creators a 10% kickback. Whether Base's meme coin scene ends up mirroring Solana's mix of chaos and scams — remains an open question, particularly as Coinbase pushes to bring a far larger and less crypto-native user base onto the network.

07Two ways to read the same trend

The meme coin boom has split crypto commentary into two camps. Critics see it as crypto at its worst: an unregulated environment where bad actors profit by exploiting hype and FOMO at the expense of inexperienced buyers. Supporters counter that the same rallies function as an on-ramp, pulling in new participants who start with speculative meme coin bets but often stick around long enough to engage with the rest of the ecosystem — and that the resulting attention and capital inflows help fund the projects that eventually matter. In this view, the churn of largely worthless tokens is simply the cost of an industry that is still working out which ideas survive.

Both readings capture something true. The meme coin market remains a mix of genuine entrepreneurial energy and undisguised greed, testing the patience of regulators and skeptics alike while continuing to draw in new capital and new casualties in roughly equal measure.