The market buys attention more than value, and attention expires
The timeline, with no comment
From there the coin grows on its own, with nobody running it. In December 2024, less than two months later, its market value passes a billion dollars and it enters the top ten of its kind. The peak comes on January 19, 2025, at $2.52 a token.
Then the scientist who had built the chatbot sells about 20 million dollars of those tokens in a private deal, saying he’ll use the money to fund a foundation. The price falls and doesn’t recover in the ten months that follow: by the end of November 2025 the coin is worth around 300 million, 88 percent below the peak. Every number in this timeline comes from contemporary sources. I report them without recomputing them, because that coin isn’t in our price archive.
thirteen monthsTimeline reported by the sources: October 18, 2024, launch on Solana and the programmer’s immediate exit for about 500 dollars; December 2024, market value past a billion; January 19, 2025, peak at $2.52; January 2025, sale of about 20 million dollars by the chatbot’s creator; November 2025, around 300 million in market value, 88 percent below the peak.
The one thing that never lied is the name
And that makes it more honest than half the projects next to it in the rankings. When a token with fifty pages of documentation and a board of advisers in blazers loses ninety percent, anyone who put money in feels betrayed, and rightly so. When the same happens to a coin with a fart in its name, there’s no betrayal left to claim.
Mind you, that’s a diagnosis more than a compliment. If the most honest project in the category is the one declaring it’s worth nothing, then the others are selling the same thing in a tie. Buyers run the same risk either way; the only difference is how much they were told first.
And meanwhile, the others we can measure
A year later, as I write, all of them are below it. The least damaged is doge, at −69 percent from its own peak; the worst is wif, at −91. Six different coins, born in different years with different communities, falling together, in the same direction and by the same order of magnitude.
Distance from the cycle peak as of November 30, 2025, computed on the daily closes in our archive: doge −69 percent, shiba −75 percent, floki −82 percent, pepe −83 percent, bonk −83 percent, wif −91 percent. All the peaks fall between November 13 and December 9, 2024.
That’s what the single case hides and the group shows. The coin born from a joke lost 88 percent, but everyone who bought attention that November paid the same bill, however good the story behind it. And the attention drained away slowly, all together, for a whole year.
What I do with this story
The wrong reading is the opposite one: writing it all off as collective madness. A billion dollars raised in two months by a project with no promise at all is information. It says that in this market the most memorable story beats the most sensible one. And it says so with a cleaner experiment than any analysis, because every other variable was set to zero.
What I do with it is use it as a yardstick. When a project lands in front of me with the technology, the five-year plan and the partnerships, the first question I ask is how much of its price is the same thing that pushed that coin up. Usually the answer is more than zero, and knowing that changes how much I put in, even when I decide to go in.
Put bluntly: a billion dollars raised in two months without promising anything is less crazy than it looks, because it shows that the most memorable story beats the most sensible one.
stood a year later