Meme Coins Plummet After Bitcoin Flash Crash Tanks Crypto Market

Meme coins tend to spike when Bitcoin and the broader crypto market are in the green, and crash harder than average when it’s in the red. And on Tuesday, many of the famously volatile crypto tokens showed sizable losses after a Bitcoin flash crash that spurred market-wide pain.

Higher-cap meme coins like Dogecoin (DOGE) and the Ethereum-based Shiba Inu (SHIB) aren’t faring too badly—DOGE is down about 6%, with SHIB only down 2% over the last day.

Bitcoin itself fell sharply, crashing from above $68,000 late Monday to a price of nearly $62,000 on Tuesday morning. This followed a “flash crash” below $9,000 on crypto exchange BitMEX that may have spooked the broader market. But Bitcoin is already regaining ground, now priced around $65,200 as of this writing. It’s down 2% on the day.

Stalwart meme coins aren’t faring too badly—but the more recent crop of coins, predominantly minted on Solana, is marking steeper drops so far on Tuesday.

Dogwifhat (WIF), for example, plunged from a price of $2.77 on Monday afternoon to a low of $2.15, though it has made up substantial ground, rising back to $2.65 at present. That’s a 7% daily dip. However, because of sizable gains last week and into the weekend, the meme coin is still up 30% over the last seven days.

BONK, until recently the top Solana meme coin by market cap, hasn’t been so lucky lately. It’s down 23% over the last week, though it has regained considerable ground over the last few hours, now down about 6% on the day. Still, at a current price of $0.00002257, it’s down by 50% from an all-time high set just two weeks back.

The freshest of prominent Solana meme coins, minted within the last week alone, are similarly plunging as fickle investors potentially rotate to other coins fearing a fatal fall.

Book of Meme (BOME), for example, which helped kickstart the renewed “presale meta” that’s been sweeping Crypto Twitter the last week, has seen wild swings on the day. It has since nearly evened out at a current price of $0.01166—down nearly 4% on the day. It fell to a price of nearly $0.009 earlier Tuesday.

But at the current price, BOME has collapsed by 57% since soaring to an all-time high over the weekend. BOME’s crash may be fueled in part by an investigation announced by Binance on Monday, as the leading crypto exchange acknowledged potential insider trading tied to its earlier-than-anticipated listing of the token.

The “presale meta” refers to a recent trend, mostly propagated by anonymous devs, of posting a Solana address for traders to send SOL to—and then sending back a batch of the meme token as it’s generated. This enriched early BOME traders substantially, though some of the follow-on projects have been plagued by controversy.

One such coin, Slerf (SLERF), is up dramatically on the day—but has already shed a lot of its peak gains. SLERF has plunged by 25% since hitting a new all-time high price overnight, yet remains up 100% on the day at a price of $1.02 due to the towering gains that piled up.

Early Monday, the anonymous developer of Slerf said that they had accidentally burned the entire $10 million presale airdrop allocation of the token.

“Guys, I fucked up,” they wrote. “There is nothing I can do to fix this.”

Even so, the burning of the liquidity pool allocation and the airdrop tokens fueled a run on the latest meme sensation on Monday, with more than $2 billion worth of trading volume amassed. Late Monday, Solana decentralized exchange (DEX) aggregator Jupiter said it would donate SLERF trading fees to crypto users impacted by the presale snafu.

Interestingly, Jupiter’s own JUP token is the biggest loser today in the top 100 cryptocurrencies by market cap, falling 14% over the last 24 hours. It’s had a strong week, however, and still remains up 29% over the last seven days. Solana (SOL) has dropped more than any top 10 coin today, shedding 8% of its value.

Edited by Ryan Ozawa.