A lot of people have been making a lot of money from memecoins in the past year or so, and memecoins have been the rave recently.
I've mostly just been looking on and not getting involved, but in the past one month or so I've been doing a lot more conscious learning of the space and looking at the coins, charts, and stuff and I've just realized, I've seen this before!
I'm 2018, I saw something just like this in my country, Nigeria.
Maybe most of the world don't know, but in 2018 something really funny happened in the Nigerian financial world.
A Russian guy called Sergei Mavrodi known as a financial criminal/fraudster brought his ponzi scheme called MMM to Nigeria somehow around 2015 or so. The way the scheme worked was you'll register, and you would be provided with someone who you have to send money to. Once you send money to this person you become eligible to be sent money to by anyone else who registers.
You'd get eligible to be sent a little more than you sent at first. So, for example you sent 100,000 you would become eligible to be sent 110,000. Something like that.
This was going really well, ponzi schemes usually go perfectly well in the begining, until the crash comes. And it came soon enough.
Nigeria is among the top countries when it comes to crypto adoption, but this Ponzi scheme slowed Nigeria's crypto adoption down because one of the payment methods was Bitcoin, and this was the way most Nigerians learnt about Bitcoin the first time.
And when the crash came, it made a lot of Nigerians distrust Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies and everything internet-related that was financial.
When MMM crashed, soon after in 2018 there was a wild rush. A ponzi scheme site would be created that had to do with registering and paying someone money in order to be eligible to be paid more than what you paid the other person.
People still took the risk to join hoping to get out quick because of what they learnt from MMM.
And surely, soon enough the site would crash. The crash comes with either the site not being able to handle the traffic, or people not wanting to register anymore after profit or after the site has lasted for some days.
Lasting for some days meant a crash was imminent or that if you paid there wouldn't be people to pay you as people were no longer registering.
Once a ponzi site comes up like this and crashes, another pops up immediately. With time these sites tweaked the game a little: when you pay you don't just get eligible to be paid a little more than you paid but instead you get eligible to be paid double or triple.
This was less sustainable, so they crashed even faster. This meant they popped up even faster. In a day we could see up to 4 different sites come up and crash. The next day another 4. The plan was always to be among the first to register so that you would get paid double or triple and bow out and hop on the next site.
Does this not remind you of memecoins?
Getting in early is the plan, you know it wouldn't last even before you got in, but you got in anyway because you know that it is new and a lot of people would get in while it is new and your plan is to take profits and leave to search for the next one.
With all these sites popping up some of us got rug pulled too, because some of the sites opened to benefit the guys who opened the site. The guys simply opened the sites and directed everyone who registered to pay them and their co-conspirators, and those who paid who were supposed to be eligible to be paid never got people sent their way.
Instead of sending new registrants their way, the owners of the sites took the registrants for themselves and absconded when people found out there was a problem.
People also treated these like trading. Many people stayed back from school and work to be on their phones and concentrate on finding the next site, getting in early, taking profits and bolting! Just to find the next one.
There were a lot of losses and gains. Crazy crazy times!
After seeing all these in 2018, it's just crazy to watch this unfold in the crypto space. I can't wait for all of these to end, but I wonder if it'd ever end in this case. People with money to pump memecoin markets can hardly lose so would they ever stop going around pumping and dumping?
Maybe except the little guys stop joining them, but would the little guy stop when the little guys benefits sometimes? And when the little guy is not hoping for only double and triple like the ponzi schemes but 150X-10000X sometimes?
Crazy.
The End
[Cover image created by myself]
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