The launch of Solana’s WEN meme coin has been among the biggest crypto stories of the last few days, but the airdrop is already finished as of Monday morning—and hundreds of billions of unclaimed tokens were burned, substantially cutting the WEN supply.
WEN holders who claimed the tokens or bought them from exchanges began dumping them en masse after the claim ended, sending the price plunging after a weekend of sizable gains that peaked early Monday.
The token price dropped 22% in an hour late Monday morning, according to data from CoinGecko, with the biggest dip coming in the minutes after the project creators burned more than 271 billion tokens—or $35 million worth at the time.
That’s over 27% of the total token supply, representing nearly 39% of the total airdrop allocation that wasn’t claimed before the deadline. WEN’s airdrop claim ended Monday at 10am ET, as planned, which means any tokens not claimed by eligible Solana users were permanently removed from circulation.
Cutting a token’s supply is often seen as a price-boosting measure, as the number of circulating tokens is slashed, thus leaving less available supply on the market. In this case, the price has fluctuated sharply over the last few hours between the token burn and WEN whales selling amid the market madness.
At the current price of $0.0001398, WEN is now flat on the day—and the price is also nearly flat compared to the end of the day on Friday, when it launched. WEN is now down 23% after setting an all-time high price of $0.0001808 early Monday morning.
Amid the WEN frenzy and a rise in Solana DeFi trading volume ahead of Wednesday’s Jupiter (JUP) token airdrop, the price of SOL is up nearly 8% today to a price over $101.
Edited by Ryan Ozawa.
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Source: https://decrypt.co/214643/solana-traders-wen-wild-ride-after-burning-35-million-tokens
