How People Who Want to Beat The System are Being Ripped Off and Lied to
This is a clip from Pump.fun, a streaming site where users like this character create meme coins to trade with their viewers, this particular streamer is evidently very excited, and he should be. He’s just done a rugpull live on stream, a coveted move in the cryptocurrency community, a move that across the globe is causing people to lose thousands upon thousands of their money. This kid created Quant coin, marketed it to his fans and has now made off with over 30,000 dollars – he’s 13.
So, what on earth is a rugpull? A rugpull is when someone, like our friend here, create their own virtual coin, advertise and sell it, and then just as investors buy in big and the coin is lucrative, they sell all their shares, making as much money as possible while tanking the market price for the coin. They pull the rug out from underneath investors, it’s a literal term, but to understand the dynamics behind rugpulls, you have to go deeper, you have to understand bitcoin, memes and a little bit about disinformation.
First it is important to take a step back, all the way back to January of 2021. When a few rogue online traders from a reddit forum called “r/Wallstreetbets”, made investments into Game Stop, an investment that was being heavily shorted by major Wall Street firms at the time. This caused the price to soar and Wall Street to panic. This marked a major societal shift, for the first time ever ordinary everyday people (or more accurately internet loners and outcasts) caused a genuine financial shock. This may seem at best vaguely related to crypto but the notion that the financial system had been gaming everyday people and now the people could game it right back was huge.
This David v Goliath mindset is a huge amount of fuel on the crypto fire. The idea that nobody has control over the value of a coin you can create and trade yourself directly links to the animosity towards financial institutions. A large reason people invest in cryptos and end up being rug pulled is they believe they are on the cusp of winning the lottery. However, even if the initial purpose of crypto was to give monetary power back to the people, this seems to be now lost.
Some people are making away with big money through crypto but like wall street, and even more like gambling, most people lose and those who don’t, can mainly chalk it up to luck. Even those who fall victim to things like rugpulls find themselves still investing. That lure that fueled r/wallstreetbets is still there, the fantasy of getting one over on the whole financial system, of being there at the right moment and making off with pockets full of cash maintains the same allure.
A meme coin could be seen as an innocent, although expensive, amount of fun if one wasn’t owned by a currently sitting President of The United States. $Trump launched after his inauguration to an initial value of around 75 million dollars. Unelected yet highly powerful political figure Elon Musk similarly has his own meme coin called $Musk. Now one could hope neither of these hugely popular coins would be rug pulled, despite the very notion of them owning a meme coin is ethically ambiguous at best. However, there is some reason to believe that elected and unelected officials alike should not be promoting these things.
Among his presidential pardons, Trump released Ross Ulbricht. Ulbricht was the owner of a dark web site for drug trafficking and throughout his time in jail Ulbricht had his own crypto coin – $pumpfun (also associated with the crytpo streaming service). Now that he has been released the coin has soared in value only for an accidental transaction by its owner to tank the share price by over 12 million dollars.
Whether Ulbricht, Trump or Musk mean to rip crypto fans off, what is clear is that very powerful and very wealthy individuals have seen the mistrust in financial institutions and capitalised on it. Trump coin does well because he himself is an outsider, because he supposedly “represents the underdog”. Yet like lambs to a slaughterhouse him and so many other supposed outsiders are bringing people into a fast paced financial market that thrives on misinformation. As of today (11th of March 2025), over $78,217,984,618 has been lost due to crypto scams and rug pulls according to crypto expert Mary White. All of this money has been taken by everyday people who still believe if they hang on just long enough, they can still beat the system. But they can’t, just like throughout all of history they are still being ripped off.
