MIRA dad vows to repay losses from rugged test token ZERO

Siqi Chen, the father who inspired the MIRA token, apologized to the crypto community for creating a test token called ZERO and selling 40% of its supply. It promised to refund the losses suffered by the affected wallets.

In a recent X post, Chen told his followers that he was launching what he called a “test token” called ZERO on the Solana (SOL) meme coin launch platform Pump.fun.

The token’s description warns investors that its value will drop to zero, and anyone who buys ZERO is guaranteed to lose all the money they invested in it. In fact, the description clearly tells investors not to buy it because “it doesn’t do anything and never will.” It is worth zero.”

Unfortunately for Chen, people are still buying ZERO. According to DEX Screener, the Solana-based token is up 178% since its launch on December 30 at 22:00 UTC. Latest data shows that one whale purchased $208,900 worth of ZERO tokens, making it the largest ZERO purchase. At the time of writing this article, the token currently has a trading volume of $32 million. As of December 31st, the handle X has already been reclaimed by a community with ZeroCTO.

Price chart of Siqi Chen’s test token ZERO in the last trading hours, December 31, 2024 | Source: DEX Eliminator

Over the last six hours, the token’s value dropped to almost 70% but it seems to be slowly recovering by 15% in the last hour. Overall, ZERO has accumulated a market cap of more than $710,000 and fully diluted volume of the same value.

Chen went to X to explain what happened to ZERO. He said he only launched the token as an experiment to see if anyone would buy it. Chen claimed that he was surprised that people still invested in ZERO despite the warning.

“I didn’t expect everyone to be able to see this [the description] and buy it – I thought this was something I should tweet about. “Then I panicked and sold 40% of the supply and got about 444 SOL,” wrote Siqi Chen, adding that he bought back the tokens with 444 SOL and burned everything.

so I launched a test token called zero with the description “this is going to zero…don’t buy” thinking people wouldn’t read it and buy it.

I didn’t expect everyone to be able to see and buy it; I thought this was something I should tweet about. pic.twitter.com/bH4b0PIlJH

— Siqi Chen (@blader) 30 December 2024

In a separate post, he apologized on behalf of the MIRA and Solana communities and promised to restore “every single wallet that lost money as a result of my actions.”

“I will do this from my personal fund, not from my $MIRA wallet. I don’t know exactly how yet, but with the help of the community I’ll try to figure out the details soon. “I will send the losses directly to the affected wallets by air,” Chen said.

Who is Siqi Chen?

Officially, Siqi Chen is known as the co-founder and CEO of a company called Runway. However, in the cryptocurrency community, he is known as the father of a four-year-old girl named Mira, who was diagnosed with a rare brain tumor called craniopharyngioma.

After Chen shared his daughter’s diagnosis, the crypto community came together to raise funds for research into finding a cure for his brain tumor. A trader with the username @shawmakesmagic and the ai16z community created a token called MIRA, named after Chen’s daughter, to raise funds for research.

The developer sent Chen 50% of the MIRA token supply, and Chen was hesitant to sell them because he didn’t want to hurt anyone. Eventually, Chen decided to sell 10% of the tokens and use 5% to fund Hankinson Laboratory research, worth $49,263 at the time.

“I just want to say that to those who say cryptocurrency is not a legitimate use case, you can say that funding rare disease research is a pretty legitimate use case,” Chen said.

At the time of writing, MIRA is down nearly 20% in the last 24 hours, according to data from DEX Screener. It is currently trading at $0.015 and has a market cap of $15 million.