In the latest sign that the crypto market’s enduring meme coin fever is likely far from breaking, the co-founder of the popular Doodles NFT brand released a surprise POOP token over the weekend to community members.
It stirred excitement, but also some controversy too—because a sizable chunk of the total supply was quickly snapped up by “snipers,” spurring accusations of traders working with inside information.
On Saturday, Doodles co-founder Jordan “Poopie” Castro abruptly announced in a blog post that he had whipped up a meme coin with little inherent value beyond its association with feces. The POOP token was launched on Base, an Ethereum scaling network built by Coinbase that has recently become a meme coin trading hotspot.
“There is absolutely no promise or guarantees of anything,” Castro wrote about POOP. “This could very well be worth less than zero, like a fresh, steaming pile of dung.”
Allocations of Poopcoin were airdropped to Doodles stakeholders past and present, including holders of affiliated NFTs (Doodles, Doodles Genesis Boxes, Dooplicators, and one-of-one Doodles); minters of the original Doodles and Genesis Box NFTs; and wallets that have participated in the management of Doodlebank, the community’s on-chain treasury.
Despite Castro’s obvious connection to the Doodles brand, and the token’s airdrop across the entire Doodles ecosystem, however, POOP has no official relation to Doodles (a clarification that had some community members initially confused).
Within minutes of POOP’s launch, airdropped POOP tokens—sent to over 14,000 wallets—were collectively worth some $3 million. But Doodles community members were not the biggest beneficiaries of Castro’s “experiment in flinging poop.” Not even close.
Immediately following Poopcoin’s launch—before Castro had even announced the token—two wallets seized over a third of the entire POOP token supply, according to analysis by on-chain data firm Bubblemaps.
One of those wallets—to use the crypto parlance—”sniped” a whopping 23.5% of the entire Poopcoin supply in seconds, before quickly splitting that bounty across 54 on-chain addresses. That sum of POOP tokens was worth roughly $5 million at the time; far more than the total value of the POOP airdrop to all Doodles community members.
The other wallet sniped 15% of the total POOP supply before Castro’s announcement, accumulating a massive bag of tokens worth roughly $3 million.
The implication that the token launch’s two lopsided beneficiaries received some sort of unfair advantage or insider tip soon began swirling on Crypto Twitter. But it wasn’t long before one of the POOP snipers unmasked themselves as Pranksy, a prominent pseudonymous NFT collector.
When prodded by Bubblemaps’ Twitter account about how they managed to buy up so much POOP so quickly, Pransky immediately replied: 40 minutes before Castro announced Poopcoin, they wrote, the Doodles co-founder had already airdropped the token to Doodles community members.
Pranksy, a Doodles holder, said they merely searched the token’s ID and bought as much as they could as soon as the token started rocketing in price, minutes later. They ended up with 15% of the entire token supply.
Not much of a mystery, it turned out. Apparently Castro’s “experiment in flinging poop” has thus far proven that fecal matter does not roll downhill in an equal distribution. And POOP, meanwhile, is down nearly 65% in the last 24 hours, per CoinGecko. It’s currently trading at less than half a cent per token.
Edited by Andrew Hayward
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