A Pump.Fun memecoin soared from zero to a market cap of $80 million on Thursday after a father's appeal for donations to a research study into his daughter's rare brain cancer attracted groups of cryptocurrency traders.

The token’s prices have fallen 80% since Thursday’s peak and are trading at just over a penny on Friday. But while late buyers are sitting on losses, the effort has still raised over $1 million for the cause.

In a post on X on Thursday, Runaway founder Siqi Chen said his daughter Mira was diagnosed with a type of brain tumor in September and that research and funding were "lacking" due to the rarity of the condition.

His GoFundMe page had raised 80% of its $300,000 goal as of Thursday, with all proceeds going directly to research efforts at the University of Colorado's Hankinson Laboratory.

Chen also posted his Ethereum wallet on thread X after user demand, later listing his Solana and Bitcoin addresses as users asked for more options.

And then Pump.Fun happened.

The platform allows anyone to mint a token for less than $2 in capital, after which they choose the number of tokens, theme, and meme image to accompany it. When the market cap of any token reaches $69,000, a portion of the liquidity is deposited into the Solana-based Raydium exchange and burned.

A user created the MIRA token attached to a photo of Chen and his daughter, with no apparent purpose other than to be a token that could be traded like any other memecoin. The user’s Pump.Fun profile shows that MIRA was just one of several tokens they created that day, with all the others failing to break a market cap of $6,000.

Later, user X @Waddles_eth bought 50% of the supply and sent it all to Chen, who boosted the memecoin into his X account.

This ensured the token went viral, sending prices from fractions of a penny to a peak of 8 cents on Thursday morning. Chen’s tokens went from a value of $400,000 to over $18 million as the token went viral. It attracted a peak of $7 million in liquidity (worth both in Solana’s SOL and the memecoin) as the market became widely traded.

It attracted over $85 million in trading volumes and over 130,000 transactions, making it the most popular smallcap in the past 24 hours.

“I’ve been on the internet for 30 years and I’ve seen a lot of shit, but this is by far the craziest day of my life,” Chen wrote on X as prices soared. “I will liquidate $1,000 worth of $MIRA every 10 minutes, in perpetuity. If they change this schedule, I promise to announce it 24 hours in advance.”

"If you want to go to $0, go ahead. Ultimately, we're aiming to raise $200,000 and we'll end up with at least $1 million for rare disease research," Chen said.

The community response to the entire event was overwhelmingly positive, with several users pointing out how these memecoins can contribute to positive outcomes in the world.

Memecoins are largely based on virality, attention, and community hype. They are considered non-serious among professional investors, but have seen massive demand and preference in the past year compared to larger, venture-backed crypto tokens — which are perceived as enriching wealthy investors at the expense of smaller retail traders.