Memecoins
Epik Duck: From Joke to $25 Million Solana Meme Coin
It only took a flash of idea, two minutes of typing and four SOLs. Within an hour, Michael Anderson had created a financial asset worth over $25 million.
“I’m sitting here wondering, ‘What the hell just happened?’” Anderson, better known by his cryptocurrency nickname I sendsaid Decipher.
The absurd story of the asset in question, a Solana meme coin called “Epik Duck,” has particular resonance in the cryptocurrency industry right now, where the meme coin frenzy has resurrected long-waning enthusiasm for the internal to the industry, but has also threatened to consume it with a naked form of gambling that is typically devoid of any pretense of technological progress or utility.
Last month, during a weekly podcast he hosts with another crypto influencer, Keyboard monkey, Mando started thinking about how to create his own meme coin. In recent months, meme-inspired crypto tokens have gone from worthless to multibillionaires ratings.
They were once meme coins, created for the first time like jokes make fun of the huge volume of useless and empty projects flooding the cryptocurrency industry – it is necessary Some amount of technical skill to create and cast. But even that barrier has fallen: Services like Pump.fun now allow users to generate new Solana meme coins in seconds, without writing a single line of code, for SOL worth a few dollars.
While recording his live podcast, Mando logged in Pump.fun and chose the image of one of his favorite memes: Epik Duck, a Roblox character who has resurfaced as viral joke on Twitter in 2021. Mando titled his new coin “Epik Duck” and filled in on the meme’s pre-existing slogan: “The Epik Duck is coming.” He then paid 4 SOL to launch the token, more than necessary, and clicked “start”. The whole thing lasted less than two minutes.
Epik Duck immediately went viral, thanks in part to listeners of Mando’s podcast, who jumped on the token. Within 10 minutes, the coin reached a market capitalization of $1 million. Within an hour it surpassed $25 million.
The 4 SOL Mando used to launch Epik Duck? That sum, initially worth around $740, netted the influencer 15% of his token supply, a purse suddenly worth $3.75 million.
That’s when a ridiculous situation suddenly becomes a lot less funny, as Mando tells it. In a matter of hours, the token’s market capitalization plummeted to $2 million. In the process, many Epik Duck owners have won and lost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Mando says he decided to burn his tokens, fearing that people would get the wrong idea of his intentions.
“I won’t get canceled for this,” Mado told himself at the time. “I didn’t want people to think that I made money from this, that I planned to do this. He had just gone absolutely crazy.
What started as a joke quickly turned into something more serious: a multimillion-dollar business with thousands of owners and Mando suddenly and involuntarily in the CEO’s chair.
“From that point on, it became a reputation issue,” Mando said. “I was a man on a mission to make this work.”
But what exactly does it mean to create a meme coin? Work? Unlike other arguably worthless assets floating in the cryptosphere, meme coins self-definition, they have no purpose. Their entire utility once underlined, as a meta-commentary, the lack of utility of cryptocurrencies.
Mando sees things differently, but he’s not your average trader. The crypto influencer previously worked at Barclays and Goldman Sachs trading distressed and high-yield bonds before emptying he and his wife’s savings accounts in 2021 to buy 80 Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs. (He ended up selling them 700% profit..)
For Mando, in their total absence of any pretense of meaning, meme coins are purer form of money.
“We all believe in the dollar. It’s a meme,” Mando said. “We all believe in Bitcoin: it’s a meme.”
“Meme coins, to me, are cryptocurrencies in their purest form,” he continued. “Meme coins are a quick rush to believe in the intrinsic value of something.”
Therefore, making Epik Duck work was like making anything else work, in a world devoid of natural value. It was just a game to convince people.
So Mando started to website for Epik Duck, together with Twitter account and Telegram channel– and then a Chinese Telegram channel and a WeChat account. He hired moderators for his social media operations and pushed Epik Duck as hard as he could. He said he barely sleeps these days as the Duck increasingly dominates his life.
The work had mixed results. Even though the token has fallen quite a bit since last month, some people still believe that Epik Duck has value; or at least, some people still believe that other people believe it has value. After falling from its peak of $25 million, the coin still maintains a market cap of $12 million at writing CoinGecko.
Meanwhile, Mando has bought back an undisclosed amount of the token, mainly, he says, 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, along with his business partners, in Pump.fun, praising the Epik Duck saga as proof of the protocol’s democratizing potential to allow any cryptocurrency user, like himself, to create something from nothing.
Not everyone sees Pump.fun’s rise so positively. Last month, a top executive at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz mocked The current explosion of the meme coin generation “undermines the long-term vision of cryptocurrencies” by turning the industry into “a risky casino.”
“This profoundly impacts adoption, regulations/laws and manufacturer behavior,” said executive Eddy Lazzarin. “I see the damage every day. You should too.”
A disgruntled former Pump.fun employee on Thursday violated protocol in a $2 million exploit that caused the site to temporarily shut down. The hacker then claimed that he intended to “kill” Pump.fun with the attack.
“It inadvertently hurts people for a long time,” the former employee later said, explaining his motivations for attacking the site.
Over 23,000 new fungible tokens were created on the Solana network on Friday, an all-time daily record. As soon as months agothat figure averaged around 300 per day.