Meme Coin Devs Are Doing Wild Things on Livestreams to Pump Tokens

Livestreaming your supposed mom shaking her breasts on camera to pump your meme coin is peak crypto degeneracy. But this sexually suggestive token, called LIVEMOM, is only the beginning of an increasingly weird—and rapidly expanding—wormhole of meme coin livestreams.

Kidnapping, even more half-naked women, and fraudulent amputees are all part of this emerging livestream meta that has taken underground Solana degen traders by storm.

At the same time that LiveMom was shaking her 36DDs next to her purported son, another livestream was underway. Aspiring political candidate Leland King Fawcette was attempting to create a meme coin called IMLIVEKICK, but the token fell from a $110,000 market cap to $10,000 in an hour—while the streamer raged in hilarious fashion, viewers say.

It’s now effectively worthless. Since then, Fawcette has streamed five more times with countless more meme coins going to zero. The streamer claims that sniper bots are “rugging” his tokens, and so he’s now devised a plan to “rug” the sniper bots in return. But some people in his Discord believe that it’s been the streamer rugging this whole time.

And so it goes amid this increasingly gonzo trend that’s seeing some developers get creative as they attempt to stand out in a crowded meme coin market.

mean while in @solana pic.twitter.com/KSQgimz3nW

— ferb (@ferbsol) May 5, 2024

Where did this come from?

Every livestream meme coin that Decrypt has seen was launched using Pump.fun. This protocol allows anyone to create a Solana meme coin in minutes for only 0.02 SOL ($3). As a result of the barrier for entry being lower than ever, Solana has seen an explosion of new tokens.

Notable meme coins like Michi, Shark Cat, and Mewing Coin were all launched using Pump.fun, along with countless thousands of others. In fact, the daily record for new Solana-based tokens minted was just broken on Tuesday, with 16,534 new tokens flooding the network in a single day. And Pump.fun is now one of the most profitable protocols across all of crypto.

Pump.fun is even how the “first” live stream token was created, according to its devs. Richard Podgurski, co-founder of LiveTwitch, said he had an “extremely unhealthy obsession” with Pump.fun, as he watched random memes surge to million-dollar market caps.

“Pump.fun, combined with freedom of speech and internet memes, has birthed 4Chan 2.0 on degenerate steroids,” Podgurski told Decrypt via email. “And I love every damn inch of it… the bad, the funny, the ugly. It’s nothing short of the greatest corner of the internet at the moment.”

Soon, he wanted in on the action and created LiveTwitch on March 26 with his partner Savanna—before setting off on a 52-hour livestream. The goal was to reinvent the social media revenue model, using the token as a subscriber model.

We will forever be the original Live degenerates 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂 pic.twitter.com/NnLGuvAuuA

— livetwitchsol (@livetwitchsol) May 3, 2024

While LiveMom promised to twerk if her coin hit a $750,000 market cap, the LiveTwitch couple have promised they’d get married if they hit $20 million. LiveTwitch’s more wholesome approach to a livestream token, however, didn’t appear to garner the same level of attention that LiveMom did.

Degeneracy prevails

In the days that followed LiveMom mania, the livestreaming meta spread—and the level of degeneracy only grew from there.

A copycat project, LIVESIS, spawned with the goal of hitting a market cap of $100,000 for the streamer’s sister to take her bra off. Once the goal was reached, the purported sister revealed her chest—though many viewers believe it was a man—before the token plummeted to pretty much zero, allegedly due to a rug pull.

We also saw a man called Roman get “kidnapped” by devs promising to release him at a $100,000 market cap. Amid a livestream showing Roman being poked with a stick while wearing a backpack over his head, the token quickly imploded.

we are officially in the stream meta pic.twitter.com/Tt0xYzgUG2

— Doonhamer (@DoonhamerNFT) May 2, 2024

Only a couple days later, a man claimed that he had no hands and thus couldn’t possibly conduct a rug pull and drain all of the liquidity from the coin. Well, he lied. After only three minutes of livestreaming with a sign tucked under his chin, the man revealed his hidden arms, sprinted to his computer, and immediately sold his $1,000 worth of HANDS.

This livestreaming meta shines a light on the troubling truth that, as humans, we’re attracted to the weird, insane, and downright wrong. Just like watching the latest serial killer documentary on Netflix or slowing down as you drive past a car crash, it’s hard to look away from the shock value of the ever-evolving nonsense that’s steadily popping up on Pump.fun and elsewhere in crypto.

Normally, being rug-pulled is a thing of nightmares for investors. But the livestreaming meta is reinventing why investors are looking for low market cap gems.

Did investors in LIVESIS believe it was going to be the next blue chip meme coin? Or did they just want to see the streamer strip and hope to avoid the dump in the process? Did Roman investors care about their own bag, or the bag over Roman’s head?

With the crypto markets broadly cooling off in recent weeks, some crypto devs apparently can’t help but try shocking new tactics to gin up interest in their meme coins. And some investors, it seems, can’t help but look—and buy in, too.

Edited by Andrew Hayward

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