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Memecoin: between Trump and DeepSeek, the scams are no longer counted
By Davide Grammatica
The advent of DeepSeek, in addition to shaking up the crypto market, has further fueled the number of “scam” projects on Solana and Ethereum
Rise in scams on Solana and Ethereum
In a memecoin world that is already quite complex and made particularly vibrant by the launch of the “presidential” memecoins $TRUMP and $MELANIA, the advent of DeepSeek has further complicated matters: in the Solana and Ethereum ecosystems, scams are no longer being counted.
In the last 24 hours alone, as Blockaid reported , a hundred tokens associated with the Chinese startup have been launched . But DeepSeek has not issued any tokens, and has no intention of doing so in the future.
Evidently, inexperienced investors and newcomers to the industry can be prone to being duped, and so tokens of this kind find fertile ground. The pattern is more or less always the same, and consists of a rug-pull within hours after launch.
Nothing new in the crypto world, let’s be clear. But compared to the past, the audience has changed, and Trump’s new approach to memecoins has in a sense legitimized the whole industry. As a result, it cannot be ruled out that the increase in “scams” stemmed precisely from this new environment.
The scams in question, by the way, are very often well engineered. There are cases where DeepSeek’s official website has been faithfully replicated, complete with a link to the wallet of the intrigued user on duty.
New risks for users
The level of exposure to these scams, according to Blockaid, would be unprecedented. And various solutions adopted by DeFi platforms such as Uniswap and DexScreener are not enough to curb this phenomenon.
Numerous tokens associated with DeepSeek are listed on PumpFun, Solana’s famous launchpad, and no solution is seen at the moment to stop this trend. Decentralization, after all, is in the crypto world a sacred principle, but it is precisely the nature of the latter that allows these episodes to occur.
We need to rethink our listing process at @coinbase given there are ~1m tokens a week being created now, and growing. High quality problem to have, but evaluating each one by one is no longer feasible. And regulators need to understand that applying for approval for each one is…
— Brian Armstrong (@brian_armstrong) January 26, 2025
The more crypto becomes established among the mainstream public, the more there will, perhaps, be a need to take countermeasures, and the entire crypto community will have to deal with it.
