Airdrop "Group Purchase", Founder's Mystery: Is boop.fun's "Incentive Flywheel" Honey or a Trap?

Author: Fairy, ChainCatcher

Editor: TB, ChainCatcher

During the May Day holiday, a meme coin launch platform named boop.fun emerged.

Its token BOOP surged by as much as 309% within an hour of its launch, briefly reaching $0.5, with its market cap skyrocketing to $500 million. Notable figures such as Solana co-founder Raj Gokal and Jupiter founder Meow joined the project's investment lineup, and just six days after its launch, the project landed on Binance Alpha, gaining rapid momentum.

However, behind the excitement, boop.fun has been mired in controversy due to its "Pinduoduo-style" airdrop mechanism and the background of its founder. With a high-profile debut, can it still achieve a shining moment?

****The Ambitious Work of Pump.Fun ****

boop.fun directly targets the "dominant" meme launcher Pump.Fun on Solana, but with a more aggressive approach.

Unlike Pump.Fun's minimalist fee model, boop.fun has built a more ambitious "incentive flywheel" around its native token $BOOP: rewards upon launch and dividends upon staking. As long as the meme coin successfully "launches on the external market" (i.e., establishes a liquidity pool on Raydium), creators and token holders can share a daily reward of 1 million $BOOP; users who stake $BOOP can also proportionally enjoy airdrops of new project tokens and dividends from platform trading fees.

In terms of token model design, boop.fun has also put in considerable effort: the total supply of $BOOP is 1 billion tokens, with 50% allocated for platform incentives and project "graduation" rewards, 15% airdropped to active users in the meme community, 10% reserved for the team, and the remainder distributed to liquidity, treasury, angel investors, and staking reward pools.

However, as the hype escalates, boop.fun has also faced waves of skepticism. How long can the "Buffed" design keep Boop's flywheel turning?

Image source: boop.fun official website

The Collapse of the Founder's Halo

boop.fun's founder dingaling has long been regarded as a star figure in the crypto industry, with investments spanning 43 projects. He is not only a well-known NFT whale but also claims to be the founder of PancakeSwap. However, with the high-profile launch of Boop.fun, doubts about him have quickly escalated…

Yesterday, Vito, the founder of Meta Era, posted on X platform, using a "fictional story" to directly point to a "mysterious founder." He stated that this founder started from the Binance ecosystem, managed a project that looked impressive but ultimately went to zero, and is now launching a new platform on Solana to disrupt the meme gameplay, essentially just changing the packaging. Vito mocked, "Then still crossing back to Binance Chain, relying on Binance Alpha to survive."

CZ later appeared in the comments section to "add a knife," also using "fictional" as a name, pointing out that a former employee was fired for insider trading, yet years later, he self-proclaimed as "some founder, CXO." He emphasized that Binance only has a CEO, CTO, CMO, CFO, COO, and CCO, and no other "C-something-O."

Although both labeled their comments as purely fictional, the community quickly directed its criticism towards boop.fun's founder dingaling, believing the insinuation was obvious. Crypto KOL AB Kuai.Dong pointed out that currently, the only person on Twitter claiming to be the "founder of PancakeSwap and Binance CRO" is dingaling.

Meanwhile, some community users pointed out that dingaling has a history of following a "replication entrepreneurship" path: when Uniswap was booming, he launched PancakeSwap; when Opensea was popular, he created LooksRare; now he is initiating boop.fun on Solana to compete with Pump.fun.

Airdrop? Or Web3 Pinduoduo?

boop.fun's airdrop activities are divided into two types: social airdrop and degen airdrop. The table below explains the two airdrop methods:

Among them, the social airdrop requires users to bind their X account and issue tokens, with the airdrop defaulting to a 30-day lock. If users want to unlock it early, they must rely on the performance of the issued tokens: a successful token launch can reduce the lock by 10 days, and when the market cap reaches $200,000, $500,000, $1.25 million, and $5 million, each tier unlocks an additional 5 days.

In short, if users want to receive the airdrop immediately, they need to issue a meme coin with a market cap of $5 million upon launch. This incentive design has sparked considerable controversy in the community, with some users joking, "Is this an airdrop? It feels more like a Pinduoduo-style Web3 group-buying scam."

Many KOLs have directly voiced their concerns. Crypto KOL AB Kuai.Dong stated that while Boop allocated a large amount of airdrop quotas to many KOLs, some even reaching 500,000 BOOP, this design essentially incentivizes influencers to "cash out their followers" for airdrops. He bluntly said, "No one wants to issue tokens to harvest the community for an airdrop; this design feels a bit like PUA for KOLs."

Community member @kunlunweb3 also criticized that this mechanism has multiple issues. Firstly, Boop mistakenly assumes that many KOLs will take risks to issue tokens for the airdrop. More critically, if no one is willing to issue tokens, the airdrop can only wait for the full 30 days to unlock, by which time the price of BOOP may have already lost support.

Additionally, the staking dividend mechanism introduced by boop.fun has also been questioned for its usefulness. Community user @BTCOld8 believes that this incentive looks appealing, but "once the platform's project heat declines and the quality of token issuance drops, the so-called dividends will lose their meaning."

boop.fun made a high-profile debut with the posture of a challenger, constructing a seemingly ambitious set of meme game rules, attempting to reshape the landscape with aggressive incentive mechanisms. However, Web3 is never short of imitators. Will Boop.fun's flywheel truly ignite community enthusiasm, or will it quickly fade like LooksRare? Is it a fleeting flower, or a game-changer?