Coinage’s $PLYBTN Memecoin Debuts to Set Fair Launch Record

Coinage has thrown ourselves into the memecoin arena with $PLYBTN notching one of the largest fair launches on Solana this year. Now, it's your turn.

As we highlighted in our first episode in this experimental series, we explained the pitfalls of memecoins and how we were seeking to attempt to right them by emulating the success of Constitution DAO back in 2021 when more than 15,000 people united on the internet to raise $40 million dollars to buy a replica U.S. Constitution.

While we didn't quite reach that level of virality without Nick Cage memes and the prospect of a live Sotheby's auction hanging in the balance — we did achieve one of the largest Solana fair launches on the PinkSale token launchpad to bring in nearly $190,000 in SOL from more than 500 contributors.

At first, we had a soft cap goal of about $6,000, but contributions in the fair launch picked up after we actually tweeted about it and shared our first episode in the series with our audience. Then Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakavenko shared a clip from our first episode and things accelerated.

In fact, we wound up ending the fair launch early to lock in a memecoin price for those who contributed at around 67,000 PLYBTN per SOL contributed before things expanded too far beyond the Coinage community. Similar to Constitution DAO, that meant everyone who participated got the same price. Proceeds from the raise were split so that 51% of the funds from the raise went into liquidity to support early trading and 49% would go to Coinage's DAO wallet.

We were all set to have trading from the main liquidity pool begin on Tuesday morning, but we delayed to the afternoon to give ourselves time to try and get Phantom, Backpack, DexScreener and other platforms and exchanges to verify our token as a sea of copy cat tokens had popped up. Considering this was the first foray into Solana for many of the people we brought into the experiment we figured the delay was warranted.

However, in that amount of time, someone else who had pulled their PLYBTN tokens from the fair launch set up a side liquidity pool. The began buying and selling very small amounts and eventually tricked Dex View into thinking PLYBTN had reached a price of $12 a token. At $12 a token, PLYBTN would have had a valuation similar to that of Moderna — once of the world's largest vaccine makers. And obviously, for as much as we think of our little PLYBTN launch, $12 billion seems unlikely.

As one might expect, price quickly came down from the listed price of $12 as selling began when the fair launch opened. With a large red candle now making our chart look ugly, more selling continued. It's not immediately clear why someone would have wanted to trick DexView into displaying that price, but the results were certainly early minutes of pressured trading as the price per PLYBTN token fell below the fair launch price.

But it's important to consider what exactly happens during these launches — and what we were hoping to avoid with a fair launch. Unlike memecoins of the past — Coinage did not promote this memecoin with any paid outside marketing beyond our own channels. We wanted to avoid a rush to enter so as to avoid a rush to exit. We understand this is foreign for most memecoin projects. But it's not clear the market understands this.

That is, as price fell — a couple of people on X were calling Coinage out for a "rug pull" — or when a creator of a memecoin token contract pulls liquidity from the pool, or sells the tokens they created into the open market. But to be clear, that has not happened. For one, liquidity in the main Raydium pool is locked for 100 days. For two, as this is an experiment looking to test if a memecoin launch can avoid the shennanigans that have plagued others, it would not behoove Coinage to replicate any rug pulling strategies.

Importantly, Coinage's DAO has not sold. And I, Coinage founder Zack Guzman, who put SOL into the fair launch have not sold my holdings either. So post-launch selling pressure isn't coming from Coinage's holdings. Indeed this experiment was inspired by movements in the past for communities on the internet to come together with a specific interest in HODLing. That has led to interesting market outcomes in the past, as both GameStop's short squeeze proved in 2021 and Bitcoin's ascent has proven time and time again.

And now, Coinage's DAO has begun its efforts to engage with our existing community to start to build ways to bring attention to this series and the project. As a community-owned outlet, the main goal of this experiment was to pull back the curtain on memecoin launches — and learn, together. We cannot help if people want to sell before the experiment has run its course. And indeed, people selling may result in the experiment running its course as sell pressure impacts price.

But as a DAO that had launched our original ownership passes (NFTs) on Ethereum to let anyone co-own our outlet with a path to patronage dividends, this experiment is also somewhat self-serving. That is, we now also have a memecoin on Solana, so Coinage sits in a rather interesting place. Similar to Pudgy Penguins, which launched their PUDGY token on Solana after launching NFTs on Ethereum, we have now effectively crossed the chasm into a new ecosystem. And we even did it before Doodles got to doing it themselves.

That opens the door to entirely new posibilites as a Web3 outlet looking to cover stories in both ecosystems — and very well could lead to Solana fans crossing into owning Coinage via our Ethereum NFTs. This experiment now puts Coinage squarely in-between both camps. We honestly aren't sure which direction this experiment in community building trends. Either way, Coinage can now bring value to a wider surface area of crypto users. It also now gives the Coinage DAO treasury exposure to start experimenting in the Solana ecosystem.

This year, our members voted to crown Solana as Coinage's Crypto Project of the Year. As such it shouldn't be surprising that we find ourselves here. And now, as we seek to figure out how to best use the rest of the funds from the launch of PLYBTN, we are actively inviting people into the experiment via participation in our customary onchain DAO votes.

It's too early to say whether memecoins or our ownership NFTs are better conduits to fostering community around our Web3 media project. But now that we have both options on the table, it will be interesting to see what "community" in Web3 really means — or if it even matters anymore. Maybe people really do just prefer trading against each other. And maybe we really do just want to re-create the stock market.

For now, anyone is invited to mint a Coinage NFT if they don't already have one to join our DAO and participate in the experiment as we move forward. Members are already actively discussing next steps in our token-gated Telegram channel. Unlike other memecoin launches that may be shrouded in mystery or led by anonymous devs — this one from the beginning has been led by the only community-owned Web3 media project in the game. Stay tuned for what happens next — or, join us to actively steer the experiment with us.

Coinage is a community-owned DAO letting our NFT holders become actual co-owners in one of the fastest-growing Web3 media outlets. Mint an NFT and become a member today to open a path to patronage dividends, or stake with us to support our project. Subscribe to our free Substack to catch all the important headlines from around the crypto world.