The market doesn’t buy value, it buys attention — 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 arrives on 19 January 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 transaction, saying he wants to fund a foundation with it. The price falls, and over ten months it doesn’t come back: 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 the sources of the time, reported and not recomputed: our price archive doesn’t contain that coin.
thirteen monthsTimeline reported by the sources: 18 October 2024, launch on Solana and the programmer’s immediate exit for about 500 dollars; December 2024, market value past a billion; 19 January 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 sitting next to it in the rankings. When a token with fifty pages of documentation and a board of advisers in jackets loses ninety percent, whoever put money in feels betrayed, and they are right. When it happens to a coin with a fart written into its name, there is no betrayal left to claim.
That isn’t praise, it is a diagnosis. If the most honest project in the category is the one declaring it is worth nothing, the problem isn’t that project: it is that the others are selling the same thing in a tie. Whoever buys is running the same risk either way; the only difference is how much they were told first.
Meanwhile, the others — the ones we can measure
A year later, at the date I write, they are all below: the least hit is doge at −69 percent from its own peak, the worst hit is wif at −91. Six different coins, born in different years, with different communities, falling together in the same direction and to the same order of magnitude.
Distance from the cycle peak as of 30 November 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 13 November 2024 and 9 December 2024.
It is the thing the single case hides and the group shows: the 88 percent of the coin born from a joke isn’t the price of the joke. It is what happened to anybody who bought attention that November, regardless of how good the story was. Attention didn’t end all at once — it drained away, all together, for a whole year.
What I do with this story
And the wrong reading is the opposite one, the one that writes it all off as collective madness. A billion dollars raised in two months by a project with no promise at all isn’t madness: it 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 keep it as a yardstick. When a project arrives in front of me with the technology, the five-year plan and the partnerships, the question I ask before the others is how much of its price is the same thing that pushed that coin up. Usually the answer isn’t zero. And knowing the answer isn’t zero changes how much I put in, not whether I go in.
Put bluntly: a billion dollars raised in two months with no promise at all isn’t collective madness, it is information — it says the most memorable story beats the most sensible one.
stood a year later