This Memecoin Just Raised $1 Million For Rare Cancer Research After A Father’s Plea

A Pump.Fun memecoin zoomed from zero to an $80 million market capitalization on Thursday after a father’s plea for donations to a research study for his daughter’s rare brain cancer has attracted many crypto traders.

Token prices have fallen 80% since Thursday’s peak and trade at just over a cent on Friday. But while the late buyers are sitting on losses, the effort still raised over $1 million for reason.

In a post on X on Thursday, Runaway founder Siqi Chen said her daughter Mira was diagnosed with a type of brain tumor in September and that research and funding are “lacking” because of how rare the condition is.

His GoFundMe page has raised 80% of its $300,000 target on Thursday, with all proceeds going directly to research efforts at the Hankinson Lab at the Univerity of Colorado.

Chen also posted his Ethereum wallet on the X thread after user demand, later putting in his Solana and Bitcoin address as users requested more options.

And then Pump.Fun happened.

The platform lets anyone issue a token for less than $2 in capital, then they choose the number of tokens, themes, and meme images to go with it. When the market capitalization of any token reaches $69,000, a portion of the liquidity is deposited into the Solana-based exchange Raydium and burned.

A user MIRA token is created which includes a photo of Chen and his daughter, which has no apparent purpose other than being a token that can be traded like any memecoin. The user’s Pump.Fun profile reveals that MIRA was just one of several tokens they created that day, with all others failing to break a $6,000 market cap.

X user @Waddles_eth eventually bought 50% of the supply and sent it all to Chen, who boosted memecoin in his X account.

This ensured virality for the token and sent prices from fractions of a penny to as high as 8 cents early Thursday. The value of Chen’s token holdings has grown to over $18 million from $400,000 when the token went viral. It gained a peak of $7 million in liquidity (worth Solana’s SOL and the memecoin) as the market became widely traded.

It garnered over $85 million in trading volume and over 130,000 transactions, making it the most popular smallcap in the past 24 hours.

“I’ve been on the internet for 30 years and seen some crap, but this has been the craziest day of my life,” Chen wrote on X as prices soared. “I will liquidate $1,000 worth of $MIRA every 10 minutes, forever. If this schedule is changed, I promise to announce it 24 hours in advance.”

“If you want to rug it to $0, go for it – at the end of the day we set out to raise $200K and we’ll end up with at least $1M for rare disease research,” Chen said.

Community response the whole event was very positive, with some users pointing out how memecoins can contribute to positive results in the world.

Memecoins are largely based on virality, attention and community hype. They are not considered serious by professional investors but have seen tremendous demand and preference in the past year compared to larger venture capital-backed crypto tokens — which are seen as enriching wealthy investors at the expense of smaller retail traders.

But MIRA has turned some of the tides.

“I think memecoins are dumb and have no future and I’m not touching them. But if I want to make a case for them I now know where to start,” said X user @JaEsf. “It’s cool and kind of crazy that you can do that in crypto. EVM, Solana or any chain. This is why Crypto exists! Simplify the movement of assets,” said @mbaril010, another X user.

Meanwhile, @waddles_eth, the user who originally sent half of the token supply to Chen, said the overall result met their expectations.

“When I saw the story about Mira and her illness, I thought it would be a good idea to purchase and send a supply to you in hopes of getting the SOL community behind a good cause this Christmas,” they said in a post. now viral X . “I’m really glad it went well and I hope the money will help find a cure for Mira and anyone else with her condition.”

Crypto for good may finally be a thing in the new year.