The situation is changing rapidly for Siqi Chen, who just a few days ago was gaining the sympathy of the cryptocurrency community with his story of appealing for help for his daughter who is battling cancer.
The "father" of the MIRA memecoin for cancer treatment is accused of Dumping tokens on the community and lying about his past. Image: Asian Hustle Network
The focal point attracting the attention of the cryptocurrency investment community on social media X (Twitter) on the morning of December 31, 2024 is the controversy surrounding Siqi Chen, who has recently risen to prominence with his story of appealing for help for his young daughter with a deadly cancer.
As reported by Coin68, Siqi Chen is an American-Chinese businessman who gained prominence on X during the recent Christmas period when he shared the story of his daughter Mira's battle against cancer. Chen said that Mira is suffering from a rare brain cancer with no known treatment, so he wanted to appeal for help for the Hankinson Research Lab at the University of Colorado Hospital to help the doctors there find a way to help his daughter and other unfortunate patients.
Siqi Chen's post received widespread attention on X, and quickly spread to the crypto community. After he shared his wallet address, someone created a memecoin called MIRA on Solana and sent half the total supply to Chen's wallet. The market capitalization of MIRA was then raised to over $70 million thanks to the response of many investors, helping the total amount raised for Siqi Chen to approach $20 million, dozens of times higher than the initial goal of $100,000.
However, Chen is now the focus of attention in the community for a different reason - he is not the "newbie" in the crypto world as he claimed.
Early this morning, Siqi Chen created a token called "zero" with the claim that "this coin will go to zero... don't buy it". However, since Siqi Chen used the wallet address that received the donations in recent days to issue this new memecoin, many investors ended up buying it, pushing the market capitalization of zero to over $6 million within an hour.
Fluctuations in the market capitalization of the zero memecoin, screenshot from DEX Screener at 09:15 AM on December 31, 2024
Chen then said that he "panicked" and sold 40% of the total token supply to receive 444 SOL (~$85,000), causing the price of zero to drop by 5 times. He has since apologized for the incident and said he used all the SOL to buy back and burn the tokens, pledging that he did not receive any profits from the incident, and that he is "still learning" to use pump.fun.
so i launched a test token called zero, with the description: "this is going to zero … do not buy it" thinking that people would read it and not buy it.
— Siqi Chen (@blader) December 30, 2024
i didn't expect everyone to just be able to see it and buy it - i thought it's something i would have needed to tweet about.… pic.twitter.com/bH4b0PIlJH
However, Siqi Chen's explanation has not been able to appease the cryptocurrency community, as they have started digging into his X account and found that he is not the "newcomer" as he claimed.
Specifically, Siqi Chen's account has been sharing about his crypto investment activities since 2021 or even earlier, showing that he has held a large amount of NFTs and even spent $340 in ETH Gas Price to receive an Airdrop worth $190,000.
... HODLing like 10 BTC and every time I look at them I get PTSD flashbacks of the 12,000 BTC that used to be there and start sobbing uncontrollably and then my wife divorces me
— Siqi Chen (@blader) February 21, 2021
"I'm still learning bro" https://t.co/yvDpg7gxxb pic.twitter.com/o6USNWtbUY
— MilliΞ (@llamaonthebrink) December 31, 2024
Indeed, when accessing the blader.eth wallet (on Ethereum), it can be seen that this account holds nearly $350,000 in crypto, with $242,000 of that from large NFT collections like Azuki, Doodles, Pixels, MAYC, Moonbirds, CLONE X,... He even still holds 4 IreneDAO NFTs despite their price dropping by 99%.
It's true, he's made zero (well, lost money, even) from most of his @Irenezhao_ NFTs too https://t.co/m44evUE7SC pic.twitter.com/fLAe6EPpqd
— kate ☁️🌱 (@katexbt) December 31, 2024
Blockchain detective ZachXBT also pointed out another case where Siqi Chen participated in pumping another memecoin just a few days ago, with the reason given also being "accidentally pressed" and he had bought back all the coins he sold.
zach i did but please check the chain i made zero from either of these
— Siqi Chen (@blader) December 30, 2024
the risk reward of this doesn't make sense for me to have done this intentionally, you know that
The evidence presented above is causing Chen to face a wave of severe criticism from the community, forcing him to constantly make statements admitting his mistakes, taking responsibility and committing to focus only on MIRA from now on.
okay, so here's what i'm going to do.
— Siqi Chen (@blader) December 31, 2024
this is going to take some time.
i fucked up, i apologize, i take responsibility.
but i am committed to making sure mine and $MIRA reputation to making whole every single wallet that has lost money as a result of my actions.
and i will do…
The price of the MIRA memecoin has at times dropped by more than 20% following the latest controversies of Siqi Chen, with the current market capitalization being only $17.2 million.
Price fluctuations of the MIRA memecoin, screenshot from DEX Screener at 09:20 AM on 31/12/2024
Compiled by Coin68
