Playing on-chain meme coins and earning tens of thousands of dollars a day is a story that everyone must have heard of. However, the story of a teenager, who appears to be in middle school or even elementary school, issuing multiple on-chain meme coins and cashing out over $50,000 from investors, is relatively rare and continues to spark discussions in the community.
To avoid you not knowing the background, let me briefly summarize it. Yesterday, a child who appears to be around 10 years old, live-streamed on Pump.fun to issue the token $Quant, and when the token's market value reached nearly $600,000, he chose to rug and run away, making a profit of up to $29,600. His other two tokens "lucy" and "sorry" were also manufactured in the same way, with a total profit of $54,000 (about NT$1,758,942).
Just as he was strutting in the live stream video and mocking the retail investors he had rugged, even making obscene gestures, the community seemed to want to play a trick on this child. After the child rug, the $Quant token's market value skyrocketed to a maximum of $80 million, and the little brat ended up selling $4 million worth.
The potential impact of on-chain meme coins on the values of young people
The live stream video of this incident quickly spread in the community, with some saying, "Learning to rug and cash out at a young age, he's going to be a big deal when he grows up," and others believing that "the kid knows how to take profits, he understands the principle of always making money."
However, while the vast majority of people in the community are commenting on the kid's rug operation, few have considered: "How much impact does making quick money through on-chain meme coins have on the values of children?"
I've played on-chain memes myself, and I've also experienced the thrill of making big money. Even as a mentally mature adult, I've been seriously affected by "making/losing a lot of money," and this situation will be even more severe for a child whose mind is not yet fully developed, and his future perception of the value of money may become even more distorted.
For example, I've heard of a few cases where students have quickly made a lot of money in on-chain memes, but due to their inability to develop good investment discipline, they ended up losing all the money they had made, and began to feel that earning $40,000 to $50,000 a month through honest hard work is something only a fool would do. As a result, in an unhealthy mental state, they are unable to learn normally in the workplace or become a true investment expert who can live off their investments, and their lives are completely out of control.
To briefly list a few, the negative impacts that on-chain meme coins may have on the values of young people:
- Strengthening materialism: Defining success solely by the amount of money, ignoring the balance of emotional and social values
- Taking on pressure and risk of failure too early: Mental health issues (e.g., excessive anxiety, self-worth crisis)
- Survivor bias: The community is often filled with stories of successful people, leading young people to mistakenly believe that making money through investment is easy, ignoring the need to develop their own professional skills
Of course, I'm not trying to completely deny the value of on-chain meme coins here. MEME is indeed a manifestation of community and culture in the current internet society, and it can help users understand market fluctuations, improve their information acquisition capabilities, and learn relevant blockchain knowledge. There have also been many cases of people getting rich through on-chain meme coins in this cycle.
However, the current market is flooded with too many on-chain meme coins that are developed solely for the purpose of profit, which is essentially a zero-sum game of people eating people (retail investors are mostly the ones being rugged). Investors need to be aware of this and control the risks they can bear.
Online bullying may extend to the real world
On the other hand, since the kid appeared on a live stream, his "rug" behavior also aroused the investors' desire for revenge, and they have doxed the kid's home address, school, and his family members' social media accounts, and left harassing messages on his family members' social media platforms.
Even more absurdly, the community has tokenized the avatars of the "kid's" father, mother, and sister on Pump.fun. Although there is no relevant news so far, there may be incidents of online or real-life bullying in the future.
Although the crypto world advocates that everyone can freely interact with on-chain protocols, I believe that blindly using the "tool is not guilty" argument to infinitely expand, while ignoring the potential harm and impact on users whose minds are not yet mature, is overly idealistic.
These various incidents have made me realize again that there are still many areas in the crypto world that need to be continuously built.
This kid rugged a coin for $30k
They doxed him and found his school
And sent the coin $QUANT to $35M market cap so his original coins would have been worth over $1M
pic.twitter.com/6NESZxZ3vJ
— Gordon (@AltcoinGordon) November 20, 2024
