When a meme coin based on a viral baby hippo in Thailand notches dizzying gains, those fortunes can melt away rather quickly. Simply look at an anonymous trader on Solana who has round-tripped millions of dollars in value these past few days.
It’s the kind of luck that degens dream of: After investing $800 in Moo Deng, an allotment of 30.2 million tokens had swelled to $7.5 million in value late last month. The value of those tokens peaked at just over $10 million on September 28 when the price of the Moo Deng meme coin hit an all-time high.
Even though the trader with a Solana wallet address beginning in “Db3P” has broken up their sizable stash across four Solana addresses, blockchain data examined by Decrypt Monday indicated that the trader has not parted ways with any Moo Deng tokens.
That has remained true, even as the trader’s holdings tumble in value.
Moo Deng’s price buckled 65% from its peak nine days ago, falling as low as $0.10 Monday. Still, the coin had risen 4% in value over the past day to $0.12.
The Solana trader still had significant profits on paper, purchasing the hippo token in bulk for two-hundred-thousandths of a penny each—four hours after it was launched.
As of this writing, the trader’s Moo Deng tokens were valued around $3.8 million, according to Solscan, representing a 433,367% increase compared to their entry price. So why hasn’t the whale sold? In short, they can’t—at least not easily, and not without further tanking the token’s price.
The market for Moo Deng, as with virtually all meme coins, is extremely illiquid. At the moment, there is only around $3.2 million in liquidity available in the Moo Deng pool on the Solana decentralized exchange Raydium, where the token trades. Were this trader to sell, even in small tranches, the price of the token would begin to fall precipitously, and the trader would only realize a small fraction of their paper gains. Attempting to sell the stash in one go would crash the price of Moo Deng by more than 50%, according to estimates on Solana DEX aggregator Jupiter.
Meme coins are extremely volatile, rising and falling based on little more than vibes. In an interview with Farokh Sarmad of Rug Radio, Decrypt’s sister company, the shark tank star Mark Cuban recently said, “Meme coins are all a game of musical chairs.”
As enthusiasm toward the Solana-based meme coin showed signs of fading, a copycat version of the token saw notable attention on Ethereum.
After Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin dumped Moo Deng on Ethereum to fund charitable initiatives, the coin’s price rocketed. Pushing as high as $0.000246, the coin’s price had fallen 23% to $0.000188. But it was still up 325% over the past day.