When Slerf meets Slorg, things get sloppy

If you are trying to make sense of crypto, the thing you need to remember is that crypto makes no sense.

Take Bitcoin. This alternate form of money did not exist 16 years ago, is based on zero real-world assets, and comes with no government guarantees, but is currently trading at about $63,700 per coin — roughly $1.25 trillion for all coins in circulation. It’s the financial equivalent of Schrodinger’s Cat, immensely valuable and utterly worthless at the same time. 

And yet Bitcoin is like a Pound Sterling personally autographed by Queen Victoria compared to the obviously shady incredibly dubious numerous crypto investment scams opportunities that have followed in its wake. Today’s post is about one of those named – and I am not kidding here – Slerf. 

But first, please indulge me in a brief-yet-fascinating digression into the world of cryptocurrency. 

What’s up, Doge?

Today there are more than 23,000 forms of crypto. A decade ago there were seven. And I’d bet the cost of a ham and cheese sandwich that no one reading this post can name more than two of them.

One of those early crypto tokens was Dogecoin. This was the first “meme coin” – so called because it was based on a wildly popular Internet meme:  a Shibu Inu wearing a look of extreme concern, accompanied by a nearly infinite variety of tersely worded captions.

Dogecoin was created as a joke by two software engineers to lampoon the utter ridiculousness of crypto trading. They never expected it to take off. But take off it did, because… crypto.

Imagine a $100 bill, only instead of a portrait of Ben Franklin it has a picture of Scooby-Doo. That’s Dogecoin. If someone tried to use Doo-bucks to buy a can of soda pop, the cashier would laugh and hand it back to them. But in the world of cryptocurrency, things are worth what people want them to be worth. And everyone wants in on the joke. So trading Dogecoin became a thing. 

At the height of its value in May 2021, each Dogecoin was worth roughly US$0.74. Not very impressive, right? Only there were so many Dogecoins in circulation that its total market capitalization reached $88 billion (with a b). [1]

That’s one good little doggie. [2]

Auntie Meme

Today there are more than 1,300 types of meme coins in circulation, and they’re hotter than ever. Last week roughly $80 billion worth were traded in places where that sort of thing happens.

The one I’m going to talk about here, Slerf, was created by someone calling himself Slorg. (Or maybe Slerf created Slorg? I honestly can’t keep it straight.) 

Again: Not kidding. 

Slorg raised $10 million in pre-sale funds –  selling to private investors before Slerf became publicly available, in order to gin up interest in the coin – which he then promptly… lost. He accidentally ‘burned’ the investors’ money by sending it to a crypto address (aka wallet) that isn’t controlled or accessible by anyone. [3]

In the world where normal bipeds live, this would be widely considered an MFU (major fuck up). But remember, we’re talking crypto here. So what happened next? 

The value of Slerf went up. By a lot. Very quickly. One early investor managed to make a $3 million profit in 12 minutes. 

All told, more than 100,000 traders bought and sold Slerf over the course of the next 24 hours, exchanging just under $2 billion. [4] This has led some to speculate that it was all really a fiendishly clever plan by Slerf to boost the value of Slorg, or maybe vice versa – I’m thoroughly lost at this point. 

To recap: The world is burning like a Pop Tart that got stuck in the toaster, Democracy is hanging from a cliff by its fingernails, two-thirds of our Supreme Court is partying like it’s 1799, and some of the world’s most technologically sophisticated people are busy making fortunes trading something called slerf.

Our alien overlords can’t arrive soon enough. Scotty, for the love of God, beam me up already.

Have you ever dabbled in crypto? Fess up in the comments below or email me: crankyolddan@gmail.com.

[1] It got a boost from the world’s most morally vacant manchild richest man in early 2021, when Elon Musk purchased $1.5 billion of Doge, just because he could.

[2] And he was too — an actual, four-legged, flea-infested canine. Per “The doge worth 88 billion dollars: A case study of Dogecoin”: 

The Doge meme, or simply ‘Doge’, was first conceived in February of 2010 when Japanese blogger Atsuko Sato posted a picture of her dog, a Shiba Inu named Kabosu, in one of her blog posts. A few months later in October, an unrelated photo of another Shiba Inu went viral on Reddit, an extremely popular internet forum, with the word ‘dog’ misspelled as ‘doge’ in its title. 

[3] People who control cryptocurrencies will often “burn” or discard coins to limit the number that are in circulation. But they don’t usually do it before the coin is even available yet. That’s some out-of-the-box thinking there.

[4] Slerf is traded on the Solana blockchain, which is based on Ethereum blockchain, which is… oh never mind. You lost interest once I stopped talking about dogs, didn’t you?