When a meme coin based on a popular baby hippo in Thailand skyrockets in value, assets can evaporate just as quickly. One trader on Solana, for example, has lost millions of dollars in value in just the past few days.
It’s the kind of luck traders dream of: After investing $800 in Moo Deng, the trader’s 30.2 million tokens rose to $7.5 million in value late last month. The value of those tokens peaked at over $10 million on September 28, when Moo Deng hit an all-time high.
Despite the trader splitting his holdings across four different Solana wallet addresses, blockchain data on Monday showed that he had not sold any Moo Deng.
Solscan data
This remains true even as the value of his holdings has plummeted. Moo Deng has fallen 65% from its peak nine days ago to $0.10 on Monday. However, the coin has gained 4% in value over the past 24 hours, to $0.12. The Solana trader is still making a big profit on paper, having bought a large amount of the hippo token at the low price of two-ten-thousandths of a cent just four hours after it was launched.
As of press time, the trader’s Moo Deng tokens are worth around $3.8 million, according to Solscan, representing a 433,367% increase from their initial purchase price. So why hasn’t he sold? In short, they can’t—at least not easily, and not without drastically reducing the value of the token.
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Moo Deng Is Illiquid
Moo Deng’s market, like most meme coins, is extremely illiquid. There’s currently only about $3.2 million in liquidity available in the Moo Deng pool on Solana’s Raydium decentralized exchange, where the token is traded. If this trader started selling, even in small increments, the token’s price would plummet, leaving them with only a fraction of their paper profits.
If they tried to sell all of their holdings at once, Moo Deng’s price could plunge by more than 50%, according to estimates from Jupiter, a Solana-based DEX aggregator.
Moo Deng Price Chart
Meme coins are notoriously volatile, rising and falling based more on sentiment than underlying fundamentals. In an interview with Farokh Sarmad of Decrypt partner Rug Radio, Shark Tank star Mark Cuban said, “Meme coins are like a game of musical chairs.”
As interest in meme coins on Solana began to wane, a copycat version of the token gained significant traction on Ethereum.
After Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin sold Moo Deng on Ethereum to fund charity, the coin’s price skyrocketed. Peaking at $0.000246, the token’s price has since fallen 23% to $0.000188. However, the coin is still up 325% over the past day.
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