Solana (SOL) made a huge comeback in 2023 and into 2024. Most of this hype is on the back of new meme coins, which have caused more investors to buy SOL and swap it for the many meme coins. A few meme coins in particular have become the leaders, particularly Bonk (BONK) and dogwifhat (WIF). However, a new set of meme coins is potentially threatening the incumbents' spots as the top Solana meme coins.
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In the past week, a handful of new tokens were launched via a new system called a token presale. The process involves sending tokens to a wallet address, which will then send back new tokens based on the total amount of interest. In this case, users sent SOL to a wallet in exchange for a share of Book of Meme (BOME) tokens.
BOME attracted $4 million in initial investment from the presale, a good portion of which belonged to the founder and some of its close peers. However, the token soon skyrocketed from an initial price of $0.00005 on March 14 to a high of $0.0286 on March 16. In total, this equates to a gain of over 57,000%. At its peak, the token had a market cap of over $1.5 billion.
To put this into perspective, a $1,000 investment in BOME at launch would have been worth over $570,000 at its peak.
One of the largest investors, sundayfunday.sol, is a close friend of the founder. The wallet invested $72,000 in the meme coin and took profits in the order of several million dollars when the position was worth over $30 million.
The extreme price appreciation turned some heads. While meme coins have been known to appreciate tens of thousands of percent in a few days, this case raised concerns, specifically as it relates to Binance.
Binance listed the token within three days of launch. Even more, a brand new wallet on Binance bought $2.3 million of SOL, which was used to buy 314 million BOME one day before Binance listed the token, according to blockchain analytics company Lookonchain. The tokens were purchased for an average price of $0.0074. The price of BOME more than tripled within 12 hours of the purchase.
Many brought these concerns to Binance, which immediately began an internal investigation in the "BOME rat warehouse," which is what the firm called the incident in a post on X. Binance also said that it would offer a reward of $100,000 to $5 million to anyone with evidence that insider trading occurred. However, after an investigation, it was concluded that the transaction was not made by a Binance staff member.
It appears that a trader simply timed the market extremely well and was not an insider at Binance. However, with less regulation than other assets, it is more difficult to obtain potentially incriminating evidence. So, continued investigation could bring about more information, but it looks as though this was simply a well-timed trade.
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