Meme Coin Airdrops $10,000 Worth of Tokens to Crypto Influencers—Most Instantly Sell

A Solana meme coin dev created a token on Pump.fun and airdropped 20% of the supply to 10 Crypto Twitter influencers. But within just a couple of days, most influencers dumped what they’d been sent.

The project branded itself as the “biggest social experiment on Solana,” airdropping approximately $10,000 worth of its CABAL token to notable figures in the scene.

The term cabal refers to a secret political faction, and it’s often been used in the world of crypto to refer to insiders that collaborate to promote specific tokens. By sending a chunk of tokens to influencers, the project said it was attempting to force a cabal to form around it—and that the influencers would feel incentivized to promote the project to their followers.

The cabal are eating good today. pic.twitter.com/4QJiLikXLN

— $cabal (@thesolanacabal) August 26, 2024

But that’s not how it worked out. Instead, most recipients turned around and sold the tokens, and just two days after launching, only three influencers remain—one of them sold and bought back at a lower price.

The initial group of influencers included Dogwifhat supporter Ansem, meme coin influencer Yenni, and Beaver, the person who said he paid ‘Crack Head Dev’ to fake his own death. Some influencers have publicly admitted that they received the tokens and dumped them on the project, while others claim the dev sent funds to the wrong wallet.

“Those idiots airdropped some random dude and he one clipped it lol,” one of the influencers, Yelo, told Decrypt. “I would have sold anyway to be honest. I don’t know why they expected to hand someone $10,000 and have them not sell. No one agreed to anything and it’s free money.”

Yelo claims to change their wallet every three days, so it’s “pretty impossible” for people to know what they’re trading. The influencer thinks the project is “dumb” and is just “harboring hate for people” while distrust in Crypto Twitter grows. The creator of CABAL acknowledged to Decrypt that they likely got the wrong address for Yelo.

Beaver, meanwhile, admits that he received the funds, instantly sold, and started talking down on the project in an attempt to cause another ‘cabal’ member to sell.

“Who it was I didn’t care but it ended up being Yenni,” Beaver told Decrypt via Twitter DMs. “After he sold I rebought everything and started pushing it.” To help the project along, he sold an additional $2,000 and said he then spent it on pushing the project via DEX Screener ads as he slowly sold his remaining tokens.

“Fun experiment,” Beaver added.

Now with just the apparent wallets of Ansem, Joji, and Meechie still holding the token, the cabal is slowly falling apart. The token peaked at a market cap of $848,000, according to DEX Screener, but has fallen all the way down to $164,000.

But the creator of CABAL thinks this is just the beginning.

“Some of the dumping was pretty funny,” CABAL creator MaxDoesCrypto told Decrypt. “[The] future is building our own cabal: the community.”