Solana founder hits out at memecoin presales with ‘Stop doing this’ plea

• More than 655,000 SOL coins have been raised from  27 pre-sale campaigns.
• These presales have divided the crypto community.

Solana [SOL] co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko urged users not to send money to memecoin pre-sales, many of which have mushroomed in recent days, creating multi-million dollar assets out of thin air.

“Stop doing this, ” Yakovenko responded to an X post by on-chain sleuth ZachXBT, which highlighted the heavy investments that have gone into raising Solana-based meme coins.

Millions worth in SOL raised

Notably, more than 655,000 SOL coins, worth $107 million at press time, have been raised from as many as 27 pre-sale campaigns. The biggest fundraiser was visual artist Dekadente, who received nearly 170,000 SOLs to seed the upcoming SMOLE token.

Similarly, pre-sale of Slerf [SLERF] fetched the creator 54,583 SOLs, while BOOK OF MEME [BOME], which ballooned to a $1 billion-market valuation recently, collected 10,132 SOL coins.

A sticking point

Many of these coins have no intrinsic value and are just products of the latest fad that has swept the crypto market, driven in part by the recent bull rally of the “more established” meme coins.

These presales have divided the crypto community with the critics questioning the rationale behind them. An X user with the pseudonym pRHO commented,

“This ruins the essence of what the user experience should be within our beloved chain. Throughout the bear market, we supported the builders, and now that spirit seems to have been overshadowed by the idea of sending money to random addresses.”

Similarly, Ki Young Ju, CEO of CryptoQuant, termed the rise of such assets as “frustrating.” He argued that developments like these overshadow the hard work done by teams who were building legit products for the industry’s advancement.

However, many users sharply differed with these views, bringing forth the argument of financial freedom – the bedrock on which the broader Web3 industry stands, or at least claims to sit.

How much are 1,10,100 SOLs worth today?

A look at price performance

While parties debate, traders continued to earn and lose money out of these tokens. After a 50% crash, BOME rebounded to gain 24% in the past 24 hours, according to CoinMarketCap. The fumble-tainted SLERF, however. fell sharply by 25%.

Meanwhile, SOL slipped back to the fifth-position in the top cryptos by market cap list after encountering a 8.5% decline.