Joke MEME coin airdrop is now worth $600K

MEME, a community-driven project inspired by a ConsenSys developer’s satire of the yield farming bubble, has gained nearly 100% in 24-hours to post an all-time high of $1,775 after listing on Poloniex.

Since the start of September, MEME has gained more than 900%, despite its supporters promoting the project through the slogan ‘don’t buy MEME.’ MEME is currently the 254th-ranked crypto asset with a $48 million market cap, with more than $17 million worth of MEME changing hands in the past 24 hours.

The project’s unlikely rise began when ConsenSys’ DeFi product lead Jordan Lyall created a mock-advertisement for a yield farming protocol generator dubbed ‘The Degenerator.’

Within hours of the post circulating across crypto-Twitter, someone had created an ERC-20 under the same name, and listed it on Uniswap under the ticker ‘MEME.’ The 28,000 token supply was distributed via airdrop in batches of 250 to Telegram users within 30 minutes of the token’s creation.

The project now comprises an “experimental protocol” that “mash[es] up some of the most exciting innovations in DeFi” by offering yield farming rewards in the form of meme-inspired non-fungible token collectibles.

11 days ago the Meme Team was born just minutes after my degenerator tweet mocked YOLO DeFi developmentNow: against all odds, and irony, it's a passionate community experimenting with DeFi and artMeme is an NFT farming protocolThe LP Pool is live!https://t.co/etBA1cmr1P pic.twitter.com/5v9dt2jc2t

Poloniex is the sixth exchange to list the token, following Uniswap, Balancer, 1inch, Hoo, Mooniswap. More than 72% of trade takes place on Uniswap.

In response to MEME’s meteoric bull-run, EthHub co-founder Anthony Sassano (‘sassal0x’) revealed that he was one of the original airdrop recipients who had sold his tokens on day one because he thought it comprised “just a random token with no use.”

Had he hodled, his stash would be worth roughly $600,000 today.