Unwanted Crypto Fame

Siqi Chen shares a story about accidentally becoming a crypto celebrity and the unexpected consequences of creating a test coin.

After raising about a quarter million dollars for a research lab through a GoFundMe campaign, Siqi started accepting crypto donations. He created his first Solana wallet and tweeted the address. Within an hour, his wallet showed $400,000 because someone had created a coin called "Mira" (named after his daughter) on pump.fun, a platform where you can create a token in thirty seconds.

The coin's market cap reached around $60 million, and Siqi owned about 40% of it. He immediately committed that every dollar would go to charity - specifically the research lab studying his daughter's tumor. He sold some to secure about a million dollars for the charity.

Later, wanting to understand how these coins worked, Siqi created a test coin called "Zero":

"I created a coin called Zero and I entered a description that said 'Hey, don't buy this coin. It literally says don't buy this coin. It'll never be worth anything. I'm never gonna do anything with it. It'll be worth $0.' I pressed the button, and what I didn't realize is I was in the background the most watched wallet in crypto. So within about 100 to 200 seconds, the market cap of this coin that I told people not to buy reached three and a half million dollars."

As he started talking about his mistake, the coin's value fluctuated wildly, eventually reaching $5-6 million. People accused him of being a scammer. To make things right, Siqi did on-chain analysis and personally paid back around $150,000 to everyone who lost money on the coin.

In total, between the GoFundMe and crypto donations, they raised about $1.4 million for the research lab.