A memecoin themed after viral Thai zoo hippo Moo Deng zoomed nearly 500%, before paring gains, in the past 24 hours as traders viewed a social media mention by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin as a positive catalyst.
Buterin sold 10 billion MOODENG for 308.69 ether (ETH), worth $762K at current prices, and transferred 260 ETH, or $642,000, to the charity Kanro earlier on Monday. His publicly-known Ethereum address vitalik.eth still holds 40 billion MOODENG tokens, worth over $8 million at current prices.
The team sent Buterin a portion of its supply when it was first issued in September. On Oct. 5, Buterin sold over $50,000 worth of MOODENG, alongside other tokens, for ether. Buterin regularly receives memecoins and tokens unsolicited as a marketing gimmick first popularized by Shiba Inu (SHIB).
Read more: Vitalik's Regift of Unsolicited DOGE Knockoffs Sends Memecoin Prices Plunging
The sales aren’t to fund his lifestyle and proceeds are usually donated to charity.
“I appreciate all the memecoins that donate portions of their supply directly to charity,” Buterin said in an X post. “Anything that gets sent to me gets donated to charity too (thanks moodeng! The 10B from today is going to anti-airborne-disease tech), though I truly prefer if you guys send to charity directly, maybe even make a DAO and get your community directly engaged in the decisions and process.”
Traders apparently took the sale and a token mention on Buterin’s X post as a positive sign as MOODENG prices surged right after Buterin’s donations, adding to a rally from last week. This brought the seven-day gains for the memcoin to over 2,700% as per DEXTools data.
Moodeng on Ethereum, alongside a separate version on Solana, is a token inspired by Moo Deng, a baby Thai hippo at the Khao Kheow Open Zoo near Bangkok. She’s the first Thai memecoin to rise over a $100 million market capitalization owing to her global appeal.
The donations come as memecoin mindshare - or social attention - marked a yearly high earlier on Monday. Some traders are calling for a “memecoin supercycle” where cultish behavior, virality, and attention serve as the fundamental backing for a meme token in favor of venture capital-backed tokens, which are perceived as a losing bet for retail traders.
But it’s not all money, with Buterin seeing memecoins as a positive sum that could ultimately help the planet.
“I've said before that I think the best thing for memecoins is if they can be maximally positive-sum for the world, so it's great to see moments when that actually happens,” he said.
Moodeng's team, meanwhile, claimed they had set up a wallet to continue similar initiatives.
"Our community greatly agrees with how you've given real-world value to cryptocurrency and used it to help others," the team said in an X post. "This is something we've also been working on. In fact, we are a CTO-led project (our community took over after the original developer left). We have also set up a multi-signature wallet and a foundation to carry out various initiatives."