Over the past few months, discussion of a new crypto coin, called FEG Token, started to slowly sprinkle across the internet. FEG, which has a logo of a gorilla and is an acronym for “Feed Every Gorilla,” started to appear on message boards online, with a smattering of anonymous investors saying the coin was “the easiest opportunity for you to get rich,” and that everyone “should take a look at” this new cryptocurrency. Soon enough, more unnamed investor types with obscure Twitter handles began discussing this new coin on Twitter, touting it as the next big crypto investment. In turn, chats about FEG started popping up on Discord, Reddit forums, and countless accounts on Instagram. People were enticed to join a Telegram group, which soon grew from a few dozen random crypto insiders to around 40,000 wannabe investors, who seemed to be on the chat on a rolling-around-the-clock basis, constantly sharing gorilla memes and gorilla jokes and gorilla analysis on FEG Token and talking about how many they had all purchased, or planned to, and how the price was going to skyrocket. There were voice chats about FEG. On YouTube, an army of “crypto experts,” who host daily and weekly crypto shows in every language imaginable, started touting FEG as the opportunity of a lifetime, dissecting the company’s white paper, and waxing prophetically about it being the “coolest, newest crypto” imaginable.
On Saturday, May 8, after a few weeks of tepid movement, FEG took off into the stratosphere as hundreds of thousands of random investors (who had been enticed to do so on all of those platforms) started to buy the coin. Over about a three-day period, the value of the token rose exponentially. Then, on Thursday around 1 p.m., the value fell like a mudslide, and over the next three hours all of those anonymous investors who had touted the value of FEG for the past few weeks off-loaded about $120 million worth of profits.
What happened to FEG was an orchestration called a “pump and dump,” where a group of random and anonymous crypto traders pump up the value of a new cryptocurrency across the entire internet, so that hundreds of thousands of unsuspecting wannabe investors, hoping this is their opportunity to get rich quick, buy hundreds of millions of dollars of this new coin, only to watch their fortunes vanish when the pumpers collectively “dump” their share, and make off with the money they have convinced those wannabe traders to invest in. In the end, the anonymous crypto traders who are constantly pumping up these coins make off with millions of dollars in the process. One crypto trader I spoke to told me they invested “a couple of grand” that was pumped up, and a week later the investor sold at a $500,000 profit. FEG, of course, is only one of countless coins this has happened to as of late. The internet, which is quickly becoming a graveyard of crypto that was pumped and dumped, has a name for them: shit coins.
If all of this sounds like a joke or scam or something in between, that’s because shit coins are half legitimate and half not. For example, Dogecoin, which some people call an “altcoin” and others simply a shit coin, was famously started as a joke and was lost to near obscurity a few months ago until the internet’s number one “crypto Karen,” also known as Elon Musk, decided to make a big to-do about it. As a result, Doge is now worth around an astounding $50 billion, more than the value of the Ford Motor Company. But while people liken the thousands of shit coins out there to penny stocks, which are essentially small public companies that trade for less than $5 per share, the difference here is that most shit coins are often created without a real business model or purpose in mind. Hence, the terminology applied to them.
If this all seems a little ridiculous, it’s designed to be. The entire premise of shit coins is to play on people’s anxieties by inflating every aspect of the coin in question. Think of it like theater, in which the entire internet is the stage, and every social platform, messaging app, and meme is at the disposal of the actors who are trying to pump up the value of a specific coin so they can make money, and then run off with the proceeds before everyone else realizes they’ve been conned by a group of rogue investors.
Most of the more successful coins are only prosperous—even if just for a few hours before the dump of the coin takes place—because their naming conventions are so immature and even profane. For example, there’s ASS coin, an acronym for “Australian Safe Shepherd,” which experienced the same vertiginous pump and dump last week, rising by tens of millions of dollars in a few hours, only to fall by tens of million hours later. There’s, of course, a Dick coin, a Pussy coin, a Poo coin (with a poop emoji for an icon), there are also coins specifically designed to work with the porn industry. There’s a whole genre of coins related to Elon Musk, including one that is called SEC coin that has more to do with fellatio with Elon Musk than the Securities and Exchange Commission. When Musk tanked the Bitcoin market this past week with what might have been his own little pump and dump, a new coin was released called StopElon coin, which had a nearly $10 million market cap soon after it launched. For a while there was a series of politically inspired coins, like Trump coin and Putin Classic coin.
These naming conventions aren’t just an attempt to be immature, but they also serve a purpose. The more attention-grabbing a coin’s name, the more people will hear about it. When you’re scrolling through a forum on Discord about new crypto, names like ASS and StopElon will clearly stand out, enticing people to click, and then hopefully buy. Because the internet is so perpetually odd, there’s been a lot of attention around animal-themed coins, sometimes referred to as “the Altcoin Zoo,” which includes such coins as TrueFlip (it has a dolphin as its mascot). There was briefly a Nyan coin, which sported the famous Nyan Cat meme floating on a rainbow, Panda coin, Shib (an abbreviation of Shiba Inu), Leash coin, and of course Dogecoin, which is another separate Shiba Inu. There’s even a cat coin appropriately named Cat. Often the creators of these coins take their naming conventions to an extreme, and then start to apply animal-themed honorifics to everything. For example, while all new cryptocurrencies are supposed to be released with a white paper outlining the purpose of the coin (if there is a purpose, or at least a pretend one), Shib instead put out a “woof paper.”
So why are people even bothering to invest in these coins? Because while the naming of them might be utterly ridiculous, if there’s one thing that has proven true with crypto over the past decade, it’s that you can actually get incredibly rich if you buy into a certain coin at the exact right time. Which is why it’s easy to understand the draw, particularly when it’s fed by an army of meme lords on Reddit, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Telegram, promising that this is the next big opportunity in crypto. The world is filled with people kicking themselves for failing to buy Bitcoin back in 2010—if you had purchased just $1 worth in March of that year, when the price of each Bitcoin was reportedly worth $0.003, that dollar would have netted you about 333.33 Bitcoin, which would have been worth about $21 million earlier this year at Bitcoin’s peak.
There is a certain genius to the shit coin market. It’s not just odd and infantile names, or the pump-and-dump scammers who manipulate the space, but every aspect of the coins are meant to create the ultimate sense of FOMO, and also a promise of extreme wealth. One example is the sheer number of coins out there. While traditional cryptocurrencies operate on a supply-and-demand metric of economics, where there is a limit to the number of available coins in the marketplace (there are currently only about 18 million Bitcoins in the Bitcoin maker space, which is partially why the price is currently so high), shit coins take the complete opposite approach, flooding the market with as many coins as their algorithms can create. For example, there are 10,000,000,000,000,000 (10 quadrillion) ASS coins in the ASS market (truly, this is not a joke), and yet each coin is currently valued at about $0.0000000305. From a psychological standpoint, people salivate at the idea of owning 3 billion ASS coins for just around $100 with the belief that a single ASS might be valued at $1 one day. (ASS coins will never be valued at $1, just for the record.) The promise of these shit coins is there like an advertisement for a luxury lifestyle brand: If you get in at the right time, and buy a huge number of these coins, you could be a bajillionaire too.
While the SEC has recently charged a few individuals with digital asset fraud for allegedly scamming people, the agency hasn’t yet cracked down on the shit coin market as a whole, perhaps because it is so difficult to track who is buying and selling these coins. It is, after all, the internet, where anonymity reigns supreme, and the entire premise of crypto has always been just that, to transact anonymously, like digital cash. But the end might be nigh for these pump-and-dump shit coin schemes, special thanks to Elon Musk. Over the past few months, the Bitcoin market rallied by hundreds of billions of dollars when Musk announced that Tesla would accept the cryptocurrency for car purchases; it then fell by almost 50% when Musk did an about-face and decided Tesla would actually not accept Bitcoin because of the environmental impact from Bitcoin mining. Some have theorized that Musk’s move was the ultimate pump and dump as he was able to buy low and sell some of his holdings high (Musk did not respond to a request for comment). Tesla even admitted to selling about 10% of the Bitcoin Musk had announced purchasing at its peak, which the company admitted had a “positive impact” on its quarterly earnings. Whatever the case, his actions seem to be ringing through the halls of Congress. According to a recent report, regulators are now pursuing more stringent guidelines around crypto assets. The question is, how many shit coins will be pumped and dumped before Congress figures out exactly what’s going on.
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