Siqi Chen, the father that inspired the MIRA token, has apologized to the crypto community for creating a test token called ZERO and selling 40% of its supply. He vows to repay the losses suffered by affected wallets.
In a recent X post, Chen told his followers that he had launched what he referred to as a “test token” called ZERO on the Solana (SOL) meme coin launch platform, pump.fun.
The description of the token warns traders that its value will fall to zero and it is guaranteed that anyone who buys ZERO will lose all the money they invest in it. The description even outright tells traders not to buy it because “it does nothing and never will. It is worth zero.”
Unfortunately for Chen, people still bought ZERO. According to DEX Screener, the Solana-based token has gone up by 178% since its launch on Dec. 30 at 22:00 UTC. The recent data shows that a whale bought $208,900 worth of ZERO tokens, making it the biggest ZERO purchase. At the time of writing, the token already has a trading volume of $32 million. By Dec. 31, it has already been reclaimed by a community with the X handle ZeroCTO.
In the past six hours, the token’s value had dropped to nearly 70%, but it seems to be slowly recovering by 15% in the past hour. Overall, ZERO has accumulated a market cap of more than $710,000 and a fully diluted volume of the same value.
Chen took to X to explain what happened with ZERO. He said he only launched the token as an experiment to see if anyone would buy it. Chen claimed he was surprised when people still invested in ZERO despite the warning.
“I didn’t expect everyone to just be able to see it [the description] and buy it – I thought it’s something I would have needed to tweet about. Then I panic sold 40% of supply and made about 444 SOL,” wrote Siqi Chen, adding that he bought back tokens with the 444 SOL and burned everything.
In a separate post, he apologized on behalf of the MIRA and Solana communities and vows to restore “every single wallet that has lost money as a result of my actions.”
“I will do this out of my personal funds, not the $MIRA wallet. I don’t know how exactly yet, but will try to figure out details soon with the help of the community. I will airdrop losses directly to affected wallets,” said Chen.
Who is Siqi Chen?
Formally, Siqi Chen is known as the co-founder and CEO of a company called Runway. Though, to the crypto community he is known as the father of a four-year old girl named Mira who was diagnosed with a rare brain tumor called craniopharyngioma.
After Chen posted about his daughter’s diagnosis, the crypto community rallied together to raise funds for research to find a cure for the brain tumor. A trader with the username @shawmakesmagic and the ai16z community created a token called MIRA, named after Chen’s daughter, to raise funds for the research.
The developer sent Chen 50% of the MIRA token supply, to which he hesitated on selling them because he did not want to rug-pull anyone. Eventually, Chen decided to sell 10% and use 5% of the tokens to fund the Hankinson Lab research, which was worth $49,263 at the time.
“I just want to say that whoever said crypto has no legitimate use cases, you can tell them that funding for rare disease research is a pretty legitimate use case,” said Chen.
At the time of writing, MIRA fell by nearly 20% in the past 24 hours according to data from DEX Screener. It is currently trading hands at $0.015 and holds a market cap of $15 million.
