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A Solana memecoin trader sold his TROLL holdings too early and missed out on a $45 million windfall.
“I do not think there is anyone else in [crypto Twitter] with a bigger fumble than me,” Solana memecoin creator Leland King Fawcette said Sunday on X, sharing transaction data, showing that he once controlled 22% of the total TROLL supply. TROLL is a Solana memecoin built around the Trollface meme. It originally launched over a year ago but has gained traction in recent weeks.
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Fawcette told Decrypt on Tuesday that he had taken a large position in TROLL on Aug. 11, 2024, believing that he could get other influential cryptocurrency accounts to also buy in and pump the coin. But that didn’t happen. Only one so-called cryptocurrency key opinion leader got in, he said.
Feeling like his ploy had fallen through, Fawcette sold his holdings hours later, dumping on the copy traders of the KOL for a 9 SOL profit. At the time, the token had a market cap of only about $9,400.
At first, it appeared that Fawcette had made the right choice. For months, the token barely moved, until this April. In April, the project received a new lease on life after the token’s original creators abandoned it and the community took over the social media and marketing.
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By the end of April, the token’s market cap had surged from nearly nothing to a high of $41 million. This rally cooled in May and June before picking up again in late July. On Wednesday, the token peaked at over $207 million, meaning that if Fawcette had been able to hold on, his position would have been worth over $45 million.
While such a loss in hindsight might give the average person sleepless nights, Fawcette has maintained in recent months that he is unbothered, a sentiment he repeated while speaking with Decrypt.
“I’ll be real, it doesn’t hurt that I [sold] TROLL because I [sold] it back in August, and the coin started running in April,” he said. “So the feeling of destruction, the feeling of hatred, the feeling of why did I [sell], that doesn’t really exist for me. Because it was a single meme coin on a platform with millions of meme coins. Secondly, there was no indication that the coin was going to run.”