Memecoin ‘Vampire Attacks’ Increase

As memecoin madness continues, the competition amongst traders and communities is intensifying, leading to an increased amount of “vampire attacks” on tokens.

Vampire attacks occur when projects or protocols launch a product with aggressive or even manipulative tactics and incentives to acquire its competition's user base. These have been common throughout DeFi, with one of the more notable successful vampire attacks being NFT marketplace Blur overtaking OpenSea. Blur incentivized users to trade on its platform via an airdrop but penalized them if they used OpenSea.

Two recent tokens, in particular, have suffered significant volatility due to vampire attacks: $MOODENG and $NEIRO.

$MOODENG is the most recent viral memecoin, which launched on Solana and traded as high as a $340 million market capitalization. However, a different token, also under the ticker $MOODENG, launched on Ethereum five days later. 

Over the last seven days, $MOODENG on Solana is down 64% to a market capitalization of $100 million. Meanwhile, $MOODENG on Ethereum, also known as Moo Deng CTO (community takeover), is up over 2000% in the same time period.

This morning, the co-founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, announced he sold all the $MOODENG on Ethereum that was sent to his wallet, driving further attention to the token. Vitalik said, “Anything that gets sent to me gets donated to charity too (thanks moodeng! The 10B from today is going to anti-airborne-disease tech), though I truly prefer if you guys send to charity directly.”

A similar phenomenon occurred when Binance controversially listed a $NEIRO token branded as “The first Neiro on Ethereum,” which held a $15 million market cap, despite the fact that a clear market leader, “NEIRO on ETH,” which had a $125 million market capitalization, had already been established.

Since the listing fiasco, “The first Neiro on Ethereum” has surged an astounding 49x and is currently worth $735 million, while the former market leader is worth just $72 million.

Traders are growing increasingly frustrated as anxiety creeps in as to whether or not the token they have invested in will face similar attacks.