According to CoinDesk, Slerf, a sloth-themed meme coin on the Solana network, raised $10 million in a presale on Monday, despite the developer mistakenly burning the liquidity provider and tokens. The launch of SLERF comes as developers are raising millions of dollars in presales, contributing to a surge in the price of Solana's SOL token, which crossed the $200 mark for the first time since November 2021.
Slerf is among several tokens that have emerged as presales in the past few days following the success of Book of Meme (BOME) earlier this month. However, the developer behind the project ended up losing all received funds after accidentally sending the tokens to a burn address. Despite this major fumble, Slerf quickly gained popularity, chalked up multiple exchange listings, a $1.7 billion trading volume, and thousands of unique holders in a few hours after going live.
SLERF was eventually floated on Solana-based exchanges, including Jupiter and Orca, and the price surged to as high as $1.4 within a few hours from an initial value near 3 cents. So far, SLERF has chalked up $1.8 billion in trading volumes and 500,000 individual trades from 106,000 traders, according to Birdeye data. Traders made millions of dollars by betting on the newly launched tokens, with one trader making just over $3 million in a little over 12 minutes from an initial amount of $1.9 million.