I Told Them Not to Buy the Coin: My Accidental $3.5M Memecoin Launch

On May 3rd, at approximately 8:30 a.m., I launched a coin. Not a metaphorical coin, not a metaphor about value or trust or social capital. A literal memecoin, called $AMUSEONX, based on my X (formerly Twitter) handle. I did not encourage anyone to buy it. In fact, I told them explicitly not to. Less than two hours later, it was worth $3.5 million.

This was not the result of cunning design or market manipulation. I had never bought or sold a memecoin before. I was not trying to ride a wave, launch a brand, or seed a cult. I was researching for a book about the people behind the memecoin phenomenon, a book that began, appropriately enough, in another strange room on February 14th, 2025. That day I was invited to observe the launch of a coin tied to Argentine President Javier Milei, a monetary radical turned memecoin messiah whose likeness has become a shorthand for rebellion and decentralization in digital markets.

The experience sparked a question: what happens if you, a complete amateur, launch a coin with no plans, no shills, no intent to profit? Would people still buy it? Would it be possible to observe this speculative mania from the inside out?

Four months ago, before my experiment began, someone else tried to answer that question for me. Without permission, they launched a memecoin using my name, image, and X profile. I wasn’t involved, but they pumped it to over a million dollars before it collapsed. At least one other impersonator followed suit. In the Wild West of digital tokens, identity is more fluid than water and, in this case, just as easily appropriated. So, I created the $AMUSEONX coin to plant a flag, not in pursuit of gain but in defense of my digital self.

PumpFun, the platform I used, has a deceptively simple name. It sounds like a toy, a game, a dare. In reality, it has become a favored launchpad for memecoins, especially those tethered to personalities, pop culture, and political figures. What distinguishes PumpFun is its structure: every token has a fixed supply of 1 billion, immutable and automatic. When a creator launches a token, 800 million coins are allocated to a bonding curve, a mathematical pricing formula that increases the cost of each token as more are purchased. Once a coin hits a $69,000 market cap, PumpFun mints the remaining 200 million and pairs them with roughly $12,000 of SOL, Solana's native token, to establish a liquidity pool on the decentralized exchange Raydium.

This creates a uniform, transparent framework that cannot be gamed by manipulating supply. You cannot mint more tokens. You cannot shrink the supply. What you see is what the algorithm permits. In a market plagued by rug pulls and vaporware, this was an appealing mechanic for someone like me, who sought to participate without swindling anyone.

It took me about an hour and roughly $700 to launch the $AMUSEONX coin. I could have spent far less, but I was learning as I went. My avatar, a stormtrooper helmet I once wore for Halloween, became the symbol of the coin. The only public announcement I made was a single thread on X, where I explained the rationale behind the launch and explicitly warned people not to buy it.

At 8:30 a.m., I posted:

"PROGRAMMING NOTE: Memecoin scammers were using my username on 𝕏 to create coins. To combat that I have created the $AMUSEONX coin myself. It is the ONLY official amuseonx coin there will ever be. DO NOT BUY IT."

At 9:20 a.m., when people accused the coin of being fake, I confirmed:

"PROGRAMMING NOTE: Yes, it is my coin. It is the only official $AMUSEONX coin. Please do not buy it."

Thirty minutes later, it was worth over $2 million.

Why? This is not a rhetorical question. I want to understand it. By 10:30 a.m., $AMUSEONX was the top trending coin on PumpFun. Before noon, it peaked at $3.5 million. My Telegram account, which had been mostly dormant, exploded. People wanted to know what I planned to do. Would I lock my coins? Would I dump them? Would I promote the coin further? Some suggested I use smart contracts to lock my holdings. One such collector suggested I use Streamflow, a third-party service, to secure 70% of my supply for a year. That seemed fair. I had no intention of selling the coin, my aim was ethnographic, not entrepreneurial. So I did it.

I posted:

"PROGRAMMING NOTE: I just locked 96,600,000 $AMUSEONX tokens with Streamflow for a year. Again, as I've said from the start please do not buy this coin."

By the time I hit the road for a short vacation, the coin’s price was bouncing between $1 million and $2 million. Buyers and sellers came and went. Some likely profited. Others likely lost money. As of this writing, 8:00 a.m. on May 4th, the coin sits at a market cap of $1.3 million.

To say this was unexpected is a comical understatement. It is difficult to convey the strangeness of watching people argue, speculate, and project hopes onto something you created specifically to warn them against. I felt like the boy who cried wolf, except that in this case, the wolf was apparently a bullish signal.

The collector community, or what might loosely be described as such, did not appreciate my framing. Many felt I was being irresponsible, that I owed it to the "investors" to manage the coin properly. But memecoins are not investments. The SEC has said so. They are collectibles. They are, to borrow from one expert, “the baseball cards of the blockchain era.” And like baseball cards, their value fluctuates wildly and irrationally, often based on sentiment, novelty, or sheer hype.

Since February, I have interviewed dozens of people behind the biggest coin launches, from entertainers to pseudonymous whales to marketing teams running meme labs 24/7. The money is staggering. Memecoins generated over $100 billion in volume last year alone. On Solana, trading fees from memecoins exceeded $3 billion, with one single trader spending $130 million on fees. And that’s just one chain.

The market is dominated by whales and bots. Roughly 10% of participants extract 90% of the profits. The remaining 90% chase ephemeral highs, often exiting with losses. Many use complex tools to identify trending launches, enter early, and exit minutes later. My Telegram inbox was filled with offers from services promising to amplify my coin’s visibility using these same mechanisms. I declined them all.

I wanted $AMUSEONX to stand as a pure experiment. No manipulation, no shilling, no team. A coin with a warning label instead of a roadmap.

And yet, people bought it.

So what did I learn? That memecoins are entertainment, first and foremost. They are a form of communal play, a kind of gambling with memes as chips. They tap into the same dopamine loops that drive people to scratch lottery tickets or buy into a Kickstarter campaign. Most fizzle out. A few go viral. Almost none matter in any long-term sense.

What matters, to me, is what they reveal. A memecoin is a mirror. It reflects our beliefs, aspirations, and irrational exuberance. It shows how identity, novelty, and scarcity can combine to produce real value—even if only for a moment. And it shows how easily people mistake narrative for substance.

I never planned to be a memecoin founder. I remain, at best, a bemused observer. But for a brief moment, my stormtrooper coin stormed the digital markets. It did so not in spite of my warning, but perhaps because of it.

And if there is any lesson in this story, it may be that the strongest sell signal in crypto is to say: do not buy this coin.

If you don't already please follow @amuse on 𝕏.