Coin World Report:
The Solana meme coin, promoted by cryptocurrency influencers, skyrocketed to a market value of $54 million in less than an hour, but shortly after, the price plummeted rapidly within seconds as a bunch of wallets sold tokens worth $3 million.
Shaper (SHAR) was launched on Wednesday and promoted with cartoon artwork of Shaper Dogs. Coupled with the push from crypto Twitter influencers, also known as “key opinion leaders” or KOLs, the meme coin quickly reached a market value of $54 million.
With the arrival of this peak, the project “Var Deck Leaks” claimed that the project’s creators have enlisted “over 50 tier-one KOLs” and plan to collaborate with exchanges and other projects. Some of the influencers mentioned in the document have denied their involvement.
The leaked deck claimed a strategic partnership with a leading meme coin, Bonk, once SHAR’s market value reaches $100 million, but Bonk’s core contributors have denied this. Meanwhile, an influential influencer named Joji, with over 200,000 followers, who also goes by a pseudonym, has denied being involved and shared a screenshot of a Telegram message allegedly denying any partnership.
But it’s not all lies. Another influential figure named Yelotree, with 180,000 fans, appeared on the deck sharing information about the project. Yelotree told Decrypt that he received a promotion reward three months ago, although he didn’t disclose it in his tweets. Yelo claimed that other major key opinion leaders have also been involved in the project, many of whom have deleted their posts.
With all this unfolding, SHAR dropped from $54 million to $35.5 million. This certainly worried insiders as the token plummeted 96.3% within two seconds after a coordinated massive sell-off, bringing the market value to $1.3 million.
An anonymous trader said, “This is one of the craziest rug pulls I’ve seen,” on Twitter.
Blockchain data visualization company Bubblemaps found that 60% of the total token supply was bought during the initial issuance and distributed to over 100 addresses. Then, each of these addresses sent their supply to a central wallet, which sold everything in a clip for $3.4 million. The company has confirmed that Decrypt’s definition of this is a rug pull.
In response, the official SHAR Twitter account explained that due to the spread of fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD), the project “no longer has funds to continue operations.” The creators of Sharpei stated that they would provide proof of communication with each prominent influencer, although they haven’t reached an agreement with everyone yet. A day later, none of this has happened.
The SHAR team has not responded to Decrypt’s Twitter comment requests.
Influencers typically receive a certain percentage of the total token supply in exchange for social media promotion of the project. For example, the leaked message from Soho Wizard, an anonymous KOL with over 115,000 followers, shows that the influencer requested 0.75% of token supply in exchange for promotion, but the team didn’t accept.
For many projects, this is a fundamental part of marketing and promotion, similar to celebrity endorsements of products. This exists at the grassroots level of Pump.fun degens, who gamble on meme coins, with micro-influencers receiving payment in small-cap tokens all the way up to multi-million-dollar tokens.
Nick Vaiman, co-founder and CEO of Bubblemaps, said, “Key opinion leaders are an important part of the cryptocurrency ecosystem, and there’s nothing wrong with projects needing marketing in and of themselves.” Decrypt added, “The problem arises when key opinion leaders fail to disclose their involvement and how much money they bought or received.”
