Epik Duck: From Joke to $25 Million Solana Meme Coin

It took just one flash of an idea, two minutes of typing, and four SOLs. In less than an hour, Michael Anderson created over $25 million in financial assets.

“I’m sitting here asking, ‘What on earth just happened?’” Anderson, better known by his nickname Cryptocurrency. Commandsaid decryption.

The outrageous story about the asset in question, the Solana meme coin called “Epik Duck,” is currently having a special resonance in the cryptocurrency industry. It is usually consumed as a blatant form of gambling with no technological advancements or usefulness whatsoever.

On his weekly podcast last month, he hosted another cryptocurrency influencer. keyboard monkey, Mando started talking about creating his own meme coin. In recent months, meme-inspired cryptocurrency tokens have plummeted from worthless levels. billions of dollars evaluation.

It used to be a meme coin. It was first created jokingly Laughing at the sheer volume of useless and empty projects flooding the cryptocurrency industry—a must. part The technical skills needed to create and ship. But even that barrier has been broken. Now, services like Pump.fun allow users to generate new meme coins on Solana in seconds with a few dollars worth of SOL, without writing a single line of code.

While recording a live podcast, Mando logged into Pump.fun and selected his favorite meme images. Epik Duck is back as a Roblox character. viral joke Mando titled his new coin “Epik Duck,” filling in the meme’s existing tagline: “The Epik Duck is Coming.” He then paid 4 SOL to release more tokens than needed and clicked “Run.” The whole thing took less than 2 minutes.

Epik Duck immediately went viral thanks to listeners of Mando’s podcast who jumped on the token. Within 10 minutes, the coin’s market capitalization reached $1 million. It exceeded $25 million in just one hour.

4SOL Mando released Epic Duck, right? The money, which was initially worth about $740, bought the influencer 15% of his token supply, which suddenly made the bag worth $3.75 million.

As Mando said, this is when a funny situation suddenly became a lot less funny. Within hours, the token’s market cap plummeted back to $2 million. In the process, many Epic Duck holders made hundreds of thousands of dollars in profits and suffered losses. Mando decided to burn his tokens out of fear that people would get the wrong idea about his intentions, he said.

“I’m not going to get canceled because of this,” Mado said to herself at the time. “I didn’t want people to think I made money off of my plan. “I went absolutely crazy.”

What started as a joke quickly turned into something more serious. It became a multi-million dollar company with thousands of holders, and suddenly Mando found himself in the CEO position without even realizing it.

“From then on, it became a thing with a good reputation,” Mando said. “I was the one tasked with doing this.”

But what exactly does it mean to create a meme coin? work? Unlike other worthless assets floating around cryptocurrency, MEM Coin is self definition, there is no purpose. Their overall utility was once a meta commentary pointing out the lack of utility of cryptocurrencies.

Mando sees things differently. But he is no ordinary trader. The cryptocurrency influencer emptied his wife’s savings account in 2021 to buy 80 Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs after trading distressed and high-yield bonds at Barclays and Goldman Sachs. (He eventually sold them. 700% profit.)

The meme coin has no meaning to Mando. purest form of currency.

“We all believe in the dollar. “It’s a meme.” Mando said. “We all believe in Bitcoin. It’s a meme.”

“To me, meme coins are cryptocurrency in its purest form,” he continued. “Meme coins are about accelerating the speed at which we believe in the intrinsic value of something.”

So operating the Epik Duck was like operating anything else in a world bereft of natural values. It was just a game to convince people.

So Mando Website With Twitter for Epic Duck account and telegram channel—And there are Chinese Telegram channels and WeChat accounts. He hired a moderator to run his social media and pushed Epic Duck as hard as he could. He said he barely sleeps these days because the ducks increasingly dominate his life.

The results of the work were mixed. Although the token price has dropped significantly since last month, some people still believe Epik Duck has value. Or at least some people still believe that others believe it is worth it. After falling from a high of $25 million, the coin still maintains a market cap of $12 million. CoinGecko.

Meanwhile, Mando repurchased an undisclosed amount of tokens, which it said were primarily used to pay exchanges and market makers and fund community rewards programs. He says he owns between 3% and 5% of the token supply.

He also invested in Pump.fun with his business partners, praising the Epik Duck series as proof of the protocol’s democratizing potential to enable every crypto user to make something from nothing just like him.

Not everyone is so positive about Pump.fun’s dominance. Last month, CEO of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz said derision The current explosion in meme coin creation “undermines the long-term vision of cryptocurrency” by turning the industry into a “risky casino.”

“This has major implications for adoption, regulation/legislation and builder behavior,” said executive Eddy Lazzarin. “We see the damage every day. “You should too.”

On Thursday, a disgruntled former Pump.fun employee The protocol was hacked. A $2 million exploit led to the site’s temporary closure. The hackers later said they planned to “kill” Pump.fun with the attack.

“It unintentionally hurt people over a long period of time,” the former employee later said, explaining his motivation for attacking the site.

On Friday, more than 23,000 new fungible tokens were created on the Solana network. This is an all-time daily record. only a few months agoThat number averaged about 300 per day.

Editor: Andrew Hayward