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Twenty-three-year-old Arnold Robert Haro addressed his last phrases to the telephone in his hand. “If I die, I hope you guys turn this into a memecoin,” he stated. Then Haro took his personal life.
Haro died on February 21 at his household dwelling in Madera County, California, a dying certificates obtained by WIRED exhibits. His suicide was broadcast reside to his followers on X, the place he glided by the deal with @MistaFuccYou. Footage of Haro’s dying has since been faraway from the platform, however the incident was briefly listed in its trending tab.
In the hours after Haro’s dying, folks created dozens of memecoins—a sort of extremely unstable crypto coin used as a vector for monetary hypothesis—modeled after him. Sensing a possibility to revenue, merchants piled into one of many cash particularly, driving its worth to $2.1 million in combination. (The coin has since misplaced 96 % of its worth.)
On X, some tried to argue that whoever was behind the MistaFuccYou coin had duly granted Haro’s last want. But most denounced the impulse amongst merchants to attempt to revenue by his dying. “If you’re trading this, you’re sick af,” wrote one person.
Speculation ran rampant on X that Haro had ended his life as a result of he had misplaced cash to a memecoin rugpull—a maneuver whereby any person creates a brand new coin, promotes it on-line, then sells off their holdings in a single swoop, devaluing everybody else’s stake. WIRED was unable to substantiate whether or not this had occurred to Haro, however his buddies have disputed the narrative. “It had nothing to do with crypto … It’s not what all these crypto nerds seem to think,” one among Haro’s buddies, who goes by j nova on social media, instructed WIRED. Haro’s household, in the meantime, has described his dying as the results of “his battle with depression.”
The incident captures in microcosm the race to the underside in memecoin buying and selling circles, the place solely essentially the most heinous and morally bankrupt concepts at the moment are rewarded with consideration, says Azeem Khan, cofounder of the Morph blockchain and enterprise associate at crypto VC agency Foresight Ventures.
“We’ve reached the point where the most potentially exciting launch that people are looking at is Kanye trying to launch a Swastika coin,” says Khan, in reference to now-deleted X posts made by an account related to the artist Kanye West. “That’s how terrible this space is.”
Until final yr, launching a memecoin was comparatively costly and technically burdensome, which meant few got here to market. Only Dogecoin—the unique memecoin—and a handful of derivatives had any kind of longevity.
That equation was reversed with the arrival of Pump.Fun, a platform that makes it easy for anybody to launch a memecoin without charge. Since Pump.Fun launched in January 2024, many tens of millions of memecoins have flooded the market, amongst them the cash modeled after Haro.