Original title: On $MIRA and What Comes Next
Original author: Siqi Chen
Original source: https://x.com/
Translated by: Daisy, Mars Finance
Last September, my family’s life took an unexpected turn when our 5-year-old daughter, Mira, was diagnosed with a rare brain tumor called adamantinomatous craniopharyngioma. Although it is benign and 90% of children survive, due to the tumor’s location in the brain, the disease is associated with the worst quality of life scores of all survivable brain tumors—from hypothalamic obesity to growth retardation and even possible blindness. In Mira’s case, Dr. Juan Fernandez-Miranda at Stanford Medical Center informed us that her tumor could not be surgically removed without significant impact on her long-term health.
In an effort to find better treatment options for Mira, I began spending my evenings and weekends reading every scientific paper I could find about this disease. Because of its rarity and relatively low fatality rate, very little funding and research has been invested in this area. So, starting last October, my wife and I decided to make a series of personal donations to the Hankinson Laboratory at Children's Hospital Colorado—the only team in North America focused on studying this devastating disease.
The Birth of $MIRA
To raise awareness of this disease and accelerate funding, my wife and I launched a GoFundMe campaign for Hankinson Labs on Christmas Eve, along with a pledge of an additional $100,000 in personal donations.
After the campaign launched, people started asking me if they could post a cryptocurrency address for donations.
I’ve been active in the Ethereum community on and off since 2017, so I immediately published my ENS address (blader.eth). But then someone asked me for a Solana address. I didn’t have a Solana address at the time, so I didn’t publish one. But the next day, I ended up creating one.
What happened next was nothing short of miraculous: a Solana community member created a meme coin called $MIRA and donated $1 million to the Hankinson Lab. I then publicly pledged that every penny in my Solana wallet would be dedicated to rare disease-related donations, all of which would be tracked on-chain.
$ZERO’s Story
Initially, I just wanted to get out of the $MIRA token as quickly as possible. But in the last two weeks, other rare disease organizations have started contacting me, asking if I could help them achieve something similar to $MIRA.
After experiencing the living nightmare of having a child with an incurable disease, my wife and I both decided that we would not be able to forgive ourselves if we passed up this opportunity that could bring transformative funding not only to Mira, but potentially to thousands of other children with rare diseases and their families.
To get an idea of how to create new tokens like $MIRA for these organizations, I created a token called $ZERO for silly testing purposes and explicitly stated:
“This token will go to zero value. You will definitely lose all your funds. Do not buy it. It does nothing and will never do anything. It has zero value.”
However, in just a few seconds, $ZERO’s value skyrocketed. I have been involved in the cryptocurrency space since 2017, but it was only last week that I was exposed to the Pump.fun memecoin ecosystem on Solana. The speed at which a new token on Solana could skyrocket so quickly was completely beyond my expectations.
Out of shock, I immediately wanted to cut off any connection with the token and avoid profiting from it. However, my mistake was to sell instead of destroying it. If I had been calmer or had a better understanding of how memecoin works, I should have destroyed the tokens.
To correct the mistake, I immediately used all the proceeds from the sale to buy back and destroy the tokens, ensuring that my charity wallet did not receive any profit. This can be easily verified on-chain.
On $ZERO’s losses and future direction
Next, I will focus on ensuring that every action is taken in accordance with the original intention, maximizing support for rare disease charities, while learning lessons and avoiding similar mistakes from happening again.
Here are my plans for the future:
Compensation for the loss of $ZERO
Volunteers from the crypto community (like @carlcortright) worked day and night to help me analyze blockchain data and identify negative P&L wallets that I held before I sold and realized losses before the market value recovered to pre-sell levels.
Every penny in my Solana wallet has been pledged to charity, not to make up for my mistake. Therefore, the funds used for the airdrop compensation come entirely from my personal funds.
We have completed the airdrop to the following addresses to compensate for the losses of all affected wallets:
Bv9ViXYLr17nkJfkQYBiuwv7D6tqQmqsYzzxg1m5otGw
Audited queries and data are open source and can be verified on-chain by the community through Dune.
Refocusing on $MIRA’s mission
My wife and I are committed to advancing $MIRA’s mission to accelerate funding for rare childhood diseases and reduce the likelihood that other families will experience the nightmare my family experienced this year. More information on this will be released in the coming weeks.
You can follow us on @0xMiraDAO or Telegram.
To avoid further loss of $MIRA wallet assets, all assets will be migrated to a multi-signature wallet for management as soon as possible.
Finally, as a tribute to everyone who has supported $MIRA’s mission, my wife and I have pledged to make another personal donation to Hankinson Lab to match the airdrop amount.
While this journey started with the goal of helping my daughter, I came to realize that meme tokens combined with a diverse community could have a powerful real-world impact in ways I never imagined, and could potentially help many families who are living through nightmares like mine.
However, I also realize that the power of these tokens requires me to be more cautious and humble as I explore this space in order to direct more funding to the cause of rare childhood diseases. I will continue to work hard to do this.
Thank you for reading.
