The Solana ICO meta was short and destructive—$149 M raised in eight days across 33 presales, most of the projects were rugs, and only one of them survived till today. In this article, we’ll go over Solana’s ICO meta; uncover how funds flowed, RoI for investors and the state of the projects today.
Introduction X ICOs ⇒ BOME ⇒ $GM.AI ⇒ $LADYF ⇒ $SHROOM ⇒ $LOS ⇒ TLDR Conclusion Tools and References
An Initial Coin Offering (ICO) is (in theory), the crypto equivalent of an IPO; token issuers offer tokens in exchange for capital. The 2017 ICO days are sometimes viewed as the golden era of crypto and Solana itself had an ICO. But the SEC classified ICOs as issuing unregistered securities and that caused them to largely fizzle out.
However, in March 2024, ICOs started picking up again, and one of the first experiments, $BOME was a raging success. It was a fair launch, and at the all time high, investors had over 10,000% RoI. But it was all downhill from there. In the weeks that followed, over 150 Million USD was raised and ultimately extracted from the system.
In the following sections, I’ll provide detailed analysis of the major ICOs during the meta;
Some figures were culled from: https://x.com/zachxbt/status/1769948459266707961
This was where it all began.
On March 11 2024, Darkfarms minted 69 Billion $BOME tokens. And on Mar 12, he asked other X users to send SOL to 6jfC9, for the launch of Book of Memes ($BOME).
The presale raised 10,132 SOL, and all of these funds, along with 50% (34.5B) of the minted tokens, were used to create a liquidity pool on Raydium.
10,132 SOL sent to Raydium. https://intel.arkm.com/tracer/976e2784-363b-46c1-a9d9-5a6d053dcb88
On March 14, the remaining 50% was distributed to investors, according to the amount of SOL invested.
SOL Investments and $BOME allocations. HDbww invested a total of 420.69 SOL and received 1.432B $BOME; quinny.sol and 7KbDt invested 200SOL each and received 681.821M SOL respectively. See: dashboard
And it was a raging success.