Memecoin Degens Raise Millions for Rare Cancer Research After a Father’s Plea

A Pump.Fun memecoin zoomed from zero to an $80 million market capitalization on Thursday after a father’s plea for donations to a research study for his daughter’s rare brain cancer attracted swathes of crypto traders.

The MIRA token’s price has fallen 80% from a Thursday peak and trades at just over a cent as of Friday. But while late buyers are sitting on losses, the effort raised over $1 million for the cause.

In an X post on Thursday, Siqi Chen, founder of the Runway corporate finance planning application, said his daughter Mira was diagnosed with a type of brain tumor in September and that research and funding had “been lacking” because of the rarity of the condition.

His GoFundMe page has raised 80% of its $300,000 target as of Thursday, with all proceeds going directly to research efforts at the Hankinson Lab at the Univerity of Colorado.

Chen also posted his Ethereum wallet on the X thread, responding to user demand, adding his Solana and Bitcoin addresses when users asked for more options.

Then Pump.fun happened.

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

A Pump.fun user created the MIRA token attached to a picture of Chen and his daughter, with no apparent objective except it being a token that can be traded like any other memecoin. The user’s profile shows MIRA was just one of the several tokens they created that day, with none of the others breaking a $6,000 market cap.

From there, though, things started to take off. X user @Waddles_eth bought 50% of the supply and sent all of it to Chen. Chen then boosted the memecoin on his X account.

That ensured virality for the token, sending the price from fractions of a penny to a peak of 8 cents early Thursday. The value of Chen’s token holdings soared from $400,000 to over $18 million. MIRA attracted a peak of $7 million in liquidity (in terms of both Solana’s SOL and the memecoin) as it became widely traded.

Trading volume topped $85 million in more than 130,000 transactions, making it the most popular smallcap in the past 24 hours.

“I have been on the internet for 30 years and have seen some shit, but this is by far the craziest day of my life,” Chen wrote on X as prices rocketed. “I will be liquidating $1,000 worth of $MIRA every 10 minutes, perpetually. If change this schedule, i commit to announcing it 24 hours in advance.”

“If you want to rug it to $0, go for it - at the end of the day we set out to raise $200K and we will end up with at least $1M towards rare disease research,” he wrote.

Community response to the event has been overwhelmingly positive, with several users pointing out how such memecoins can contribute to positive outcomes in the world.

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

MIRA has helped shift the conversation.

“I think memecoins are dumb and have no future and I don't touch them. But if I wanted to make a case for them I would now know where to start,” X user @JaEsf said. “This is beautiful and quite crazy that you can do that with crypto. EVM, Solana or any chain. This is why Crypto exist! Simplify movement of assets,” said @mbaril010, another X user.

Meanwhile, @waddles_eth, the user who originally sent half the token’s supply to Chen, said the overall outcome met their expectations.

“When I saw the story about Mira and her illness, I thought it would be good to buy and send supply to you with the hopes of getting the SOL community behind a good cause on Christmas,” they said in a now-viral X post. “I'm really glad that it worked out the way that it has and I hope that the money helps to find a cure both for Mira and anyone else with her condition.”

Crypto for good may finally become a thing in the new year.

CORRECTION (Dec. 27, 09:06 UTC): Corrects name of Chen's company to Runway. An earlier version of this story called it Runaway.