Solana Presales Raise $140 Million Across 33 Campaigns

Since March 12, the Solana ecosystem has witnessed 33 token presale campaigns, collectively raising 796,000 SOL (approximately $139 million at the time of writing). This data comes from on-chain analyst ZachXBT.

Update: Added a few more Solana presales from the replies that I missed and the total SOL raised is up to >796,000 SOL ($149.2M) from 33 presales. pic.twitter.com/O7dBqAunni

— ZachXBT (@zachxbt) March 19, 2024

The largest presale was for the meme coin Book of Meme (BOME), launched by the X-account 0xDekadente, which received 169,982 SOL (around $27.7 million).

According to CoinGecko, since its launch, BOME has surged approximately 40,000% from $0.00005 to a peak of $0.02. The asset is currently trading at $0.01. 

ZachXBT highlighted several instances of fraud and rug pulls resulting in losses of approximately 25,400 SOL (around $4.4 million).

Let’s check in on a few of the recent presale coins

-7000 SOL sent to @Sartoshi0x who secretly pocked 62% of SOL from presale & did not fully distribute tokens

-2100 SOL sent to @Jared_eth a fake Jared MEV bot account (people sent another fake Jared account $440K for a presale… https://t.co/3TNwcpNkh8 pic.twitter.com/YyVkwcN9fS

— ZachXBT (@zachxbt) March 19, 2024

According to his findings, the user Sartoshi0x secretly retained 62% of the 7,000 SOL raised in the presale.

A scammer impersonating the blogger Jared MEV stole 2,100 SOL. The analyst noted that in June 2023, users sent a similar fake account about $440,000 during a presale. 

3,300 SOL was taken by a scammer with the nickname bluekirbyftm, who impersonated another fraudster, the researcher claims. The largest presale scam involved the theft of 13,000 SOL by the user Vombatus_eth. 

ZachXBT described the situation as a “presale meta” and noted that his data does not capture the full extent of such transactions. Presales are also occurring on Ethereum, BNB Chain, Base, and other networks. 

Stop doing this. https://t.co/wY7E38MqYh

— toly ?? (@aeyakovenko) March 19, 2024

“Stop doing this,” urged Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko in response to the analyst’s posts.

Amid the ongoing frenzy surrounding meme tokens, Solana-based decentralized exchanges have captured about half of the market in terms of daily trading volume. The leading platform is Jupiter with $2.66 billion, followed by Raydium with $2.4 billion.

Earlier, the creator of the meme coin Slerf, which raised funds through a presale, accidentally burned all the coins intended for the liquidity pool and airdrop. Despite the setback, the crypto community and major players supported the project.