MEME Trend is Sweeping In, Can the ERC-50 Standard Ensure the Safety of Participants' Funds?

Meme is a unit that carries cultural ideas and symbols, continually spreading and proliferating in people's consciousness. Like genes, memes vary in their ability to propagate; those that resonate with people endure, while those with less influence are quickly forgotten.

The meme token that first gained widespread recognition is likely Dogecoin, the dog-themed coin that Elon Musk proclaimed would be used as a payment method for Tesla, marking the beginning of the meme token craze.

The emergence of meme coins allows cultural ideas, symbols, and their propagation to be traded and speculated upon. Their value is based on the relevance of the meme and their ability to capture attention and consensus.

MEME Coin Craze on the Solana

In this round of the market, multiple meme coins on the Solana blockchain have seen significant surges. Various meme coins have garnered attention from meme enthusiasts and investors due to their vision, brand image, and marketing strategies.

For instance, the founder of BOME is the enigmatic crypto artist Darkfarms1. He has a vision to create an immortal memecoin. With his passion for memes and innovative perspective, he is determined to create an unprecedented memecoin—a type that can permanently store meme content on the blockchain, fundamentally changing the way we interact with it.

An operational mistake by the founder of the SLERF project led to the accidental destruction of all liquidity and airdrop tokens. The situation of no selling pressure made SLERF highly sought after in the market. Moreover, the SLERF team did not get discouraged; they ultimately turned the crisis into a successful opportunity through a series of actions.

Of course, the success of the numerous memes on the Solana blockchain is also attributed to the support from Solana co-founder Toly. Toly has frequently liked and shared various meme projects on social media. Previously, Toly's attire as a “dragon” at the Breakpoint conference led to the meme project Silly Dragon gaining popularity.

According to Coingecko, currently, there are 7 projects on the Solana blockchain with a market capitalization exceeding $100 million. Furthermore, the market capitalizations of dogewifthat and Bonk have surpassed $1 billion.

The fervor surrounding the MEME concept has gradually spread from the Solana blockchain to other public chains or Layer2 solutions.

However, not all projects in this MEME frenzy are trustworthy. A large number of fraudulent projects have emerged alongside. The forms of scams include:

• Founders running away with the raised funds.

• Pre-purchasing at a low price to create a pump and dump scheme.

• Removing liquidity leading to a sharp drop in token price.

• Creating fake social media accounts for well-known projects.

ERC50 Protocol

On March 29th, a meme project named DINO started fundraising on the Base chain, and this statement became their source of community trust. DINO announced the launch of a new ERC50 protocol, the essence of which is fair token distribution, with almost all operations during the presale written into the smart contract. This protocol can automatically allocate tokens, lock them, issue refunds, and add LP to the liquidity pool automatically. According to the project team, the project can achieve: no admin keys, no pump and dump schemes, and no RUG pulls.

Even though ERC50 has not yet been voted as an official ERC token standard by the Ethereum community, DINO has successfully launched.

The protocol's code documentation outlines the following points:

• No admin keys, no special withdrawal rights, no pump and dump schemes, no one can buy faster than others, no one can rug pull. All raised funds will be added to the liquidity pool.

• The contract is derived from the ERC20 token contract.

• Fair launch functionality has been added for the Uniswap-V2 liquidity pool.

• Players only need to send the corresponding Ether to the contract to receive tokens.

• Players can deposit tokens into the contract at any time before the launch to receive a refund.

• Once certain conditions are met, players only need to send 0.0005 Ether to the contract. The contract will then send all sold tokens and the equivalent Ether from the contract to a DEX exchange to increase liquidity. Tokens can be traded immediately.

• Currently, only the Uniswap-V2 version of the contract is provided to prevent adding liquidity before launch.

In fact, the functionalities of the so-called ERC50 protocol don't appear to be groundbreaking. Features like automatic token locking and distribution through smart contracts have been widely used in many IDO platform projects for quite some time. However, when these features are now adopted in meme coins following the recent “money-making frenzy,” they seem to address people's pain points and expectations regarding meme coin issuance.