Telegram intern takes on memecoins

A few days ago, the Telegram intern behind the messenger’s X account posted his personal TON wallet. Users almost immediately started sending him memecoins, and someone even launched a token in his honor. Imagine their surprise when, just a few days later, almost all of those coins were sold.

This is not the first time something like this has happened in crypto. For years, the industry has had a strange little tradition: once a public figure’s wallet becomes known, people start sending tokens to it. Most of the time, the goal is to later write in the project description: “Look, this well-known person holds our token.” The recipient, of course, usually never asked for any of it.

The most prominent example is Vitalik Buterin. During Ethereum’s memecoin boom, people sent him tokens en masse, hoping to use his name as part of their marketing. After a while, Vitalik started getting rid of those tokens: he burned some and donated others to charity. Holders were unhappy, but he later made a fair point: he had never asked to become part of anyone else’s project.

The Telegram intern story comes with a different context. Technically, he also never asked anyone to send him tokens, but after MTONGA, it lands differently. Telegram has become TON’s new hope for a revival, and people close to the brand now carry extra weight. That makes the memecoin sell-off look especially bad. What adds even more fuel to the fire is that most of the coins were swapped not into native GRAM, but into USDT.

We have little doubt that things like this do not go unnoticed by Pavel Durov. Still, we want to believe this was not a deliberate signal to the ecosystem, but simply a bad call. The intern has already tried to smooth things over by launching a meme contest with a 100 USDT prize.

@thedailyton