Crypto's Greatest Project Just Pranked Everyone

New joke crypto tokens looking to mimic Dogecoin have been popping up like crazy this spring — so much so that people have now dubbed this “Shitcoin Spring.”

Pepe is the latest so-called meme coin that’s getting all the attention this time around, and only needed a few weeks to crack a market cap of $1 billion. Most of the money flowing into the frog-inspired cryptocurrency (which admittedly does absolutely nothing) has come from speculators swapping ethereum for it.

In fact, that’s usually the playbook for these meme coins: Launch a token, put out some marketing around it, maybe get some influencers to tweet about it, and then wait for the pump. Then … dump. For people who time that process well, there are fortunes to be made.

Some early Pepe speculators turned a couple hundred bucks into millions. So you might understand why over the last couple of weeks, people had been looking to pile into any of the weird variants on Pepe that inevitably followed, like PepeMoon, PepeGold, PepeAI, SaudiPepe, StonedPepe, PepElon, Astro Pepe, and RektPepe just to name a few. (We at Coinage just put out an episode on the meme coin craze and you can watch it below.)

For those looking to be extremely early on a token, some people even invest before the token is officially launched in what is known as a pre-sale. That’s usually pretty sketchy, but even more so when the people behind a promised token are completely anonymous. Nonetheless, as history has shown, greed can get people to do some wild things.

That truth sparked what began as a joke from a blockchain developer and consultant based in Croatia named Ivor "Voshy" Ivosevic. He wondered how many people might be dumb enough to send him money for a token he called $GREED. And sure enough, despite not mentioning any upside about the project, in a matter of days he already had thousands of DMs from people looking to send him money to get in early.

"I never planned on getting following or engagement from this," Voshy told Coinage in a new interview. Yet, the project blew up and he went from having about 2,000 followers on Twitter to more than 30,000.

But what was he going to do with $GREED? That’s where the joke became one of the greatest social commentary projects crypto has ever seen.

Rather than collect anyone’s money, Voshy set up incredibly onerous permissions for people to join the pre-sale. They would have to give him permission to write to a user’s Twitter account for them, and they would have to give up control for Voshy to possibly drain their wallet. He thought surely no one would be so driven by greed to accept those terms. But $GREED won out.

In the end, more than 55,000 wallets headed to Voshy's site, GreedConsumes.Me, to claim a payout of 8,007,320,330 $GREED tokens —but people were then surprised by the tokens freezing immediately upon being transferred, making trading or price speculation impossible. And why that oddly specific number of tokens? Well, written another way, (800) 732-0330, is the SEC's phone number. (lol)

Voshy had one final masterstroke: each person who connected their Twitter account to his site gave him permission to Tweet on thier timeline. So Voshy made each of their accounts Tweet a statement admitting that they were careless and thanking Voshy for teaching them a lesson.

Even some high-profile accounts became Voshy's mouthpiece, such as the Twitter for Slope Finance, a Solana wallet which abandoned its Twitter account after being hacked – or so everyone thought.

So even some well known high-profile accounts fell for it, but was that the point? Voshy says it was about exposing how stupid greed for meme coins has gotten.

"I feel like I managed to push it big enough and hard enough that some people actually did [learn], which makes me super happy,” Voshy said. "I clearly refused a stupid amount of money just to prove a point and try to educate the most people possible … I think half of them will forget in a bit, but I hope it sticks at least with some of them."

For more on Voshy’s $GREED project, check out Coinage’s article and subscribe to Coinage on YouTube!