💀 Telegram intern takes on memecoins

⚫️ A few days ago, the Telegram intern behind the messenger’s X account posted his personal TON wallet. Users almost immediately started sending him memecoins, and someone even launched a token in his honor. Imagine their surprise when, just a few days later, almost all of those coins were sold.

⚫️ This is not the first time something like this has happened in crypto. For years, the industry has had a strange little tradition: once a public figure’s wallet becomes known, people start sending tokens to it. Most of the time, the goal is to later write in the project description: “Look, this well-known person holds our token.” The recipient, of course, usually never asked for any of it.

⚫️ The most prominent example is Vitalik Buterin. During Ethereum’s memecoin boom, people sent him tokens en masse, hoping to use his name as part of their marketing. After a while, Vitalik started getting rid of those tokens: he burned some and donated others to charity. Holders were unhappy, but he later made a fair point: he had never asked to become part of anyone else’s project.

⚫️ The Telegram intern story comes with a different context. Technically, he also never asked anyone to send him tokens, but after MTONGA, it lands differently. Telegram has become TON’s new hope for a revival, and people close to the brand now carry extra weight. That makes the memecoin sell-off look especially bad. What adds even more fuel to the fire is that most of the coins were swapped not into native GRAM, but into USDT.

🖊We have little doubt that things like this do not go unnoticed by Pavel Durov. Still, we want to believe this was not a deliberate signal to the ecosystem, but simply a bad call. The intern has already tried to smooth things over by launching a meme contest with a 100 USDT prize.

@thedailyton