Members of the Solana community and the crypto ecosystem denounced the recent surge in inflammatory memecoins on March 22.
Unknown parties recently took advantage of Solana’s token creation feature to introduce thousands of memecoins with racist and antisemitic terminology in their names, some tokens also contained anti-China descriptions and other broadly offensive material.
Solana founder and CEO Anatoly Yakovenko spoke out against the trend on X, simply stating:
“F’ these anti-Semitic racist incels.”
DEX Screener responds
DEX Screener, a popular third-party service that monitors tokens on various blockchains, including Solana, said it would review its policies following the high rate of offensive memecoin launches in recent days.
The company said:
“We won’t be the gatekeepers of what happens on-chain, but we’re definitely not here to spread hate.”
The platform’s documentation indicates that all data is currently handled in real time “without any human moderation or intervention.”
As of press time, the trend has slightly diminished. However, it is unclear whether DEX Screener has taken action against it.
Molly White of web3isgoinggreat suggested that the offensive tokens initially filled DEX Screener, few of those tokens are currently trending on the platform’s main page. Furthermore, memecoins representing backlash against the harmful content are trending, including “Stop Racism on Solana” and “F— DEX Screener.”
Memecoin frenzy
The crypto industry has been gripped by a memecoin frenzy for months now, driven primarily by the blistering surge in value seen by BONK and WIF, among others.
Solana’s cheap costs and fast transactions have positioned it as the main benefactor of the surge in memecoin trading, with a significant percentage of the trading volume occurring on the network.
SolanaFM recently reported that more than 20,000 new tokens are created daily on the network. Solana’s rising token count is accommodated by its comparatively low transaction fees, which make creating new tokens more affordable than on other blockchains.
For example, whereas the average Ethereum transaction fee is above $9.00, Solana transactions typically cost a fraction of a cent — though actual transaction costs on each chain may vary.
Over the past 24 hours, all but 5 of the 50 top trending cryptos on DEX Screener circulated, at least in part, on Solana.
