Doge spiked from $0.008 in late January to $0.68 on Wednesday.Īccording to moderators on four pump servers, a crop of new servers and social media “pump” accounts sprang up around the same time, with at least a dozen ripping off WallStreetBets’ name or logo. They thought it would be funny, a good meme, to pump up the outdated and irrelevant cryptocurrency. WallStreetBets users turned to Dogecoin next. Later analysis attributed much of the spike to huge firms, rather than retail investors, but the spirit of the thing got people thinking: If they were in the right Discord server at the right time, maybe they could earn a buck. The app attracted tons of attention for its role in the WallStreetBets campaign to boost GameStop this January, when the meme stock rocketed from $20 to $347 in a matter of days. Originally a gaming-centric chat app, Discord has lately developed a strong culture of finance-centric servers. Trade volume on cryptocurrency exchanges is surging, particularly with lesser-known coins that have no fundamental value outside of investing. Since then, experts say, it’s only gotten bigger. In 2018, the Wall Street Journal identified 175 “pump” initiatives, moving over $825 million through 121 different crypto coins, most of them organized on Discord and Telegram. Losers are left holding the bag.Ĭrypto pumps have been on the rise for a few years now, thanks in part to the relative ease of making and marketing a new digital coin. Get the timing right, these groups promise, and you come out a winner (and richer). Step 2: Convince other people to join you-the more, the merrier, the bigger the potential gains as the price of the coin goes up. Step 1: Buy in early, when the coin is low. After watching the great GameStop stock boom play out on sites like Reddit and Discord this winter, hundreds of thousands of hopefuls are joining Discord groups that promise big earnings from manipulating the crypto market-also known as crypto pump-and-dumps. All of it, of course, was for naught-a cautionary tale about believing anyone who claims they have a surefire plan to get rich quick.Ī hundred and fifty years later, a new generation of amateur investors is equally desperate not to miss the next big thing in the finance world. Investors sunk millions in today’s money into the scheme. After the California Gold Rush, in 1870, two Kentucky swindlers whipped up a scheme to prey on thirsty financiers’ FOMO.