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The GROK meme coin—which shares a name but isn’t affiliated with Elon Musk’s AI chatbot—shot to zero after blockchain sleuth ZachXBT said it was linked to a known scammer.
Usually stories about meme coins going to zero end there. But not this time.
The token price dropped about 74% yesterday after ZachXBT claimed that the Twitter account promoting the meme coin has been linked to at least one other scam.
It was a rapid turnaround just hours after GROK achieved a market capitalization of $160 million—and all while being an unofficial token that’s not been okayed by Musk or X AI, his artificial intelligence startup.
Not that people in this space will care but @GROKERC20 $GROK was created by a scammer.
Same exact X/Twitter account has been reused for at least one other scam.
X/Twitter ID: 1690060301465714692 pic.twitter.com/iKu7zb6YeS
— ZachXBT (@zachxbt) November 13, 2023
After hitting an all-time high of $0.02 on Monday, GROK is now trading for less than a penny— $0.008405, according to CoinGecko. In the rush after ZachXBT leveled his accusations at the dev team, on-chain analytics platform Arkham Intelligence spotted one trader selling $500,000 worth of GROK tokens at 40% slippage in a rush to unload them.
But the devs who created GROK maintain they’re not trying to pull off a scam.
They hosted a Twitter space yesterday and then burned $1.7 million worth of tokens that were sitting in the deployer wallet. They shared links to the transactions on Etherscan to prove it. The gesture was meant to show that they didn’t intend to sell the tokens and leave investors holding worthless GROK bags.
That was enough to convince some traders that the GROK is a “good trade” and the devs don’t intend to scam token holders. It even fanned the flames for criticism of pseudonymous on-chain sleuths—mostly from GROK holders who didn’t like seeing the value of their tokens plummet.
One user replied to a message alleging the GROK meme coin team was linked to past scams by wagging their finger at ZachXBT for sending it to zero. “This is a community project and you are WRECKING people,” the user wrote. “So much for being the 'Good guy' of [Crypto Twitter].”
Others—somewhat sarcastically—thanked him for saving them by sending the token price to zero before the scammers could. That left ZachXBT feeling like he’s damned if he does flag likely scams, damned if he doesn’t.
If I make a post before devs or insiders dump their tokens then people say i
I am trying to harm them with FUD.If I wait and sit on that info until after insiders or devs sell then people tag or DM me saying I should have done something.
Just cannot win.
— ZachXBT (@zachxbt) November 13, 2023
As of this writing, GROK is sitting at a $56 million market capitalization with $1.4 million worth of liquidity, according to DexTools.
Edited by Guillermo Jimenez