Original author: Fairy, ChainCatcher
Original editor: TB, ChainCatcher
During the May Day holiday, a Meme coin launch platform called boop.fun emerged.
Its token BOOP rose by 309% within one hour of its launch, reaching $0.5 at one point, and its market value soared to $500 million. Solana co-founder Raj Gokal, Jupiter founder Meow and other well-known figures appeared in the project investment lineup. The project was listed on Binance Alpha only six days after its launch, with rapid momentum.
But behind the excitement, boop.fun is embroiled in controversy due to its airdrop mechanism and the background of its founder. Can it have its own highlight moment after its high-profile debut?
Challenging Pump.Fun’s ambitious work
boop.fun directly competes with the "overlord" Pump.Fun launched by Meme on Solana, but its approach is more aggressive.
Unlike the minimalist charging model of Pump.Fun, boop.fun has built a more ambitious "incentive flywheel" around its native token $BOOP: launching is rewarding, staking is dividends. As long as the Meme coin successfully "launches external disk" (that is, establishes a liquidity pool on Raydium), the creator and the coin holders can share the daily 1 million $BOOP rewards; and users who stake $BOOP can also enjoy the new project's token airdrops and platform transaction fees in proportion.
boop.fun also put a lot of thought into the design of the token model: the total supply of $BOOP is 1 billion, 50% of which are used for platform incentives and project "graduation" rewards, 15% are airdropped to active users of the Meme community, 10% are reserved for the team, and the rest are allocated to liquidity, treasury, angel investors and staking reward pools.
However, as the popularity soared, boop.fun also encountered doubts. How long can the "full buff" design keep Boop's flywheel spinning?
Image source: boop.fun official website
The founder’s halo collapses
Dingaling, the founder of boop.fun, has always been regarded as a star in the crypto industry. He has invested in 43 projects. He is not only a well-known NFT whale, but also claims to be the founder of PancakeSwap. However, with the high-profile launch of Boop.fun, doubts about him have quickly fermented...
Yesterday, Vito, the founder of Meta Era, posted a post on the X platform, using a "fictional story" to directly point to a "mysterious founder". He said that this founder started his business with the Binance ecosystem, and managed a project that "looked great from a distance, but actually went back to zero". Now he has launched a new platform on Solana to subvert the Meme gameplay, but in fact, the medicine remains the same. Vito sarcastically said: "Then he still crossed back to the Binance chain and relied on Binance Alpha to survive."
CZ later appeared in the comment section to "add fuel to the fire", also using the name "fiction", pointing out that a former employee was fired for insider trading, but a few years later he named himself "founder of so-and-so, CXO". He emphasized that Binance only has CEO, CTO, CMO, CFO, COO, CCO, and no other "C someone O".
Although both of them were marked as purely fictitious, the community quickly pointed the finger at boop.fun founder Dingaling, believing that the insinuation was obvious. Crypto KOL AB Kuai.Dong pointed out that Dingaling is the only person who claims to be "PancakeSwap founder and Binance CRO" on Twitter.
At the same time, some community users pointed out that dingaling has always been good at taking the path of "replica entrepreneurship": when Uniswap became popular, he launched PancakeSwap; when Opensea was popular, he created LooksRare; now he has launched boop.fun on Solana to compete with Pump.fun.
Airdrop? Or Web3 Pinduoduo?
boop.fun's airdrop activities are divided into two types, one is social airdrop and the other is degen airdrop. The following table explains the two airdrop methods:
Among them, social airdrop requires users to bind X account and issue coins, and the airdrop is locked for 30 days by default. If you want to unlock in advance, you must rely on the performance of the issued tokens: 10 days can be exempted if the token is successfully launched, and when the market value reaches 200,000, 500,000, 1.25 million, and 5 million US dollars, each level will be unlocked for 5 days.
In short, if users want to receive the airdrop immediately, they have to issue a meme coin with a market value of $5 million. This incentive design has caused a lot of controversy in the community, and some users joked: "Is this an airdrop? It's more like a Pinduoduo-style Web3 group buying scam."
Many KOLs have directly voiced their concerns. Crypto KOL AB Kuai.Dong said that although Boop has allocated a large amount of airdrop quotas to many KOLs, some of which are as high as 500,000 BOOPs, this design is essentially to encourage bloggers to "sell fans" in exchange for airdrops. He bluntly said: "No one wants to issue coins to harvest the community for airdrops. This design is a bit like PUA KOL."
Community member @kunlun web3 also criticized that this mechanism has multiple problems. First, Boop wrongly assumes that many KOLs will risk issuing coins for airdrops. More importantly, if no one is willing to issue coins, the airdrop can only be unlocked after 30 days, by which time the BOOP price may have already lost support.
In addition, the effectiveness of the staking dividend mechanism launched by boop.fun has also been questioned. Community user @BTCOld 8 believes that this incentive looks good, but "once the popularity of the platform project declines and the quality of the issued coins declines, the so-called dividends will lose their meaning."
boop.fun debuted as a challenger, building a set of seemingly ambitious Meme game rules, trying to reshape the track with radical incentive mechanisms. However, Web3 has never lacked imitators. Can Boop.fun's flywheel really turn the community's enthusiasm, or will it quickly fade away like LooksRare? Is it a flash in the pan or a game-changer?
