Is Solana an Enabler of Scams?

We reported on Monday about Libra in detail. One thing we mentioned was the big picture question. “Is this just part of truly permissionless decentralized finance?

Solana’s stablecoin volume is falling for the first time in over a year. The last 7 days saw a decline of $772 million in stablecoins on SOL. All of that and more went into stablecoin supply on Ethereum. And we all know why. Libra. It’s left a bad taste in the mouths of many. For some, it’s a step too far. Is Libra going to kill Solana’s reputation? Or worse, the chain itself? Plus, there’s a huge token unlock coming soon. It couldn’t come at a worse time. Let’s see how bad the damage is.

Is Solana an Enabler of Scams?

We reported on Monday about Libra in detail. One thing we mentioned was the big picture question. “Is this just part of truly permissionless decentralized finance? OR do they know they are enabling these scams so the chain and apps can benefit?” On Monday, it wasn’t clear. It’s clearer now, though. And not in a good way.

It’s fair to remember that scams and gambling often help chains improve their performance or find their place in the market. It happened with Ethereum twice, with the ICO craze of 2017 and the NFT craze of 2020-21. And they came out of it OK.

That said, Ethereum was seen as a neutral party. The scams were blamed properly on the scammers themselves. However, new information is coming out, including from the pro-Solana news source Solana Floor, among others. And this new info is about a long term scheme to extract as much value as possible out of SOL memecoin casino users.

This implicates Kelsier Ventures and Hayden Davis, whom we talked about on Monday. But it also implicates Ben Chow co-founder of Meteora, who was instrumental in LIBRA’s launch and rug. Chow has since resigned due to his partner’s citing a “lack of judgment”. This text thread says it all. “We are going for maximum extraction on this one”. More info is coming out that this is an inside job that was known and planned well in advance.

Ben chow (Meteora) resigned today according to a statement from @weremeow, Meteora’s cofounder… citing a “lack of judgement”

I don’t think we’ve heard the end of this. https://t.co/JoQqzs69GR pic.twitter.com/Fers1p2LLd— Coffeezilla (@coffeebreak_YT) February 18, 2025

On Monday, we showed how plainly the sniping was done with new tokens being listed on Jupiter after the Kelsier Ventures project went to zero. Well, here’s more evidence from Solana Floor about how the Jupiter employees were sniping on the token launches.

YCC founder and crypto threader Duo Nine shows here, along with a couple of others how using Bubblemaps and other on-chain data that Melania and Libra were from the same team. That and the previously mentioned sniping by insiders proven on-chain, too.

1/ Melania and Libra were inside jobs. Jupiter and Meteora teams appear to have facilitated it.

Both protocols are co-founded by meow, the Jup CEO. The lead at Meteora just resigned after this.

On-chain data shows they had prior knowledge these tokens would launch. A small 🧵