Lure of Quick Money Sees $100M Flow to Solana Meme Coin 'Presales'

Raising millions of dollars appears not to require a working product, a white paper, a long-term plan or even a meme picture in some parts of the crypto market. These days, a simple post on X announcing a so-called presale can attract millions of dollars in Solana’s SOL token.

Presales are events where tokens are nominally sold before the official launch. They are typically conducted by sending funds to a crypto address and receiving, at a later date, a predetermined number of tokens.

Some on-chain watchers estimate that over $100 million worth of tokens were sent to various meme coin presales over the weekend, mainly on the Solana blockchain. The frenzy of handing over funds in return for a promise has left some market observers unimpressed.

“2 years later and everyone is right back to bidding ponzis,” popular Ethereum investor @sassal0x said in a post on X. “People can do what they want with their money but sending money to a 'memecoin presale' that has a 99.9% chance of rugging is actually just dumb as hell.”

“Presale is live,” is the general template for such posts. “To participate send SOL to (contract address). Minimum participation: 0.5 SOL.”

The hype over presales soared after the success of Book of Meme (BOME). Its creator offered a presale last week, and early investors turned a few hundred dollars into hundreds of thousands of dollars in paper gains in a few days.

The token's market capitalization went from zero to $1.6 billion in a few days, with over $100 million in daily trading volume. It was listed on prominent crypto exchanges including Huobi and Binance, much to the surprise of some observers.

BOME’s price action led to other opportunistic developers floating their own presales. Scores of X posts, mainly from influencers – accounts with a large following – are trying to raise capital in return for a promise of a token that may be distributed to funders later on.

For example, one project captured $30 million in a 30-minute period in European morning hours on Monday. The project purports to be an AI-driven application.

Several presale tokens issued since BOME have already turned over millions of dollars in trading volumes in the past 24 hours, hitting market capitalizations of as high as $600 million, Birdeye data shows.

The frenzy has contributed to a jump in Solana’s SOL tokens. The SOL price crossed $200 for the first time since November 2021 as network activity continues to grow rapidly.