Meme Coins: Easy Money or Straight-Up Theft?

Crypto has always been a game of risk. I’ve taken plenty of them — bet on micro caps, jumped into NFTs, and played with high-risk DeFi protocols. But last night, I saw a whole new level of the game. A friend of mine — someone who has been launching meme tokens for a few months — gave me a live demonstration.

In just minutes, he created a meme coin on Pump.fun, a Solana-based launchpad designed to make token creation seamless. He tweaked a few parameters, set the tokenomics, and hit deploy. Almost immediately, he started executing a pump-and-dump strategy — bringing in early volume, hyping the token, and dumping it on unsuspecting buyers.

It was flawless. Fast. And seemed almost too easy.

He’s made $16,000 this month doing this, and from his perspective, it’s just another strategy in the game. “There’s always a way to profit,” he explained, emphasizing how timing is everything.

For the first time in my crypto journey, I wasn’t sure how to feel about it.

Meme coins are notorious for their volatility. Some go 10x, 50x, even 100x in hours, while others vanish before most buyers can even hit “sell.” In early 2024, the Solana meme coin…