In short
- Last year, $10 million was sent to a pre-sale wallet for the highly anticipated Solana meme coin Slerf. The developer accidentally burned everything.
- Now, 19 months later, the Slerf developer has finally refunded every presale participant in Solana tokens.
- The milestone was reached when the meme coin migrated to a new token contract to increase its total supply.
Accidental meme coin developer $10 million worth of investors burned money last year with a single misclick, announcing the error on X with a message that has become part of crypto-degen lore: “Oh fuck.”
“There is nothing I can do to fix this,” the pseudonymous developer posted at the time. “I’m so fucking sorry.”
Now, 19 months later, the developer is behind Slerf has finally been able to do something to fix the problem, by refunding everyone who participated in the infamous token presale.
In most other industries, burning millions of dollars of investor money would result in heavy lawsuits, job losses and countless tears. But in crypto, it was turned into a marketing stunt that gathered community support and rocketed the Slerf token to a market cap of $740 million per year. DEX screener.
“It was a roller coaster to say the least,” the Slerf developer, who goes by Grumpy, said Declutter. “When the fire happened, I honestly had almost no hope of ever getting back the $10 million I owed to presellers. It felt like an impossible situation. What kept me going was the community’s response.”
While Slerf migrated his contract to increase As for the overall supply, the meme coin’s X account announced yesterday that it was finally able to complete sending in-kind refunds to everyone who participated in the token presale. The meme coin developer sent a total of 53,359.62 SOL, or $10.3 million, to 25,444 wallets. The money was raised through a combination of donations and trading fee income. Refunds were then slowly rolled out to investors since the fire some not knowing they had even been refunded.
“The refund process ended up taking over a year simply because we had to rebuild from scratch,” Grumpy said. “Every bit of donations, revenue, or support we received went directly toward making presellers whole again. It’s been 1.8 years of perseverance, transparency, and dedication, and I couldn’t be more proud of what the community has accomplished together.”
Many Slerf presale participants went to X Unpleasant celebrate their refunds. A posted that Slerf is “the only memecoin that has actually delivered on its promise.” The coin currently has a market cap of just under $30 million, well below its peak.
This time it’s just for tradition. Funds are SAFU.
— Slerf (@Slerfsol) October 21, 2025
The Slerf meme: How did we get here?
Slerf was a hyped Solana meme coin that generated $10 million worth of Solana in pre-sales – a method used to raise money for tokens before launch pads like Pump.fun became popular. Grumpy burned all this money and accidentally sent the tokens to an unrecoverable address, in what he had done to call to action “the biggest mistake of my life.”
As you would expect after losing ten million dollars of other people’s money, Grumpy said Declutter that many people were understandably angry. But eventually the frustrations seemed to subside when he took responsibility for what happened.
“I went straight to Twitter Spaces to explain what happened and took full responsibility for the mistake,” Grumpy said Declutter. “It wasn’t easy, but being transparent seemed to resonate with people. Over time, that honesty turned what started as outrage into something incredible: a sense of unity and shared purpose. I think that’s what really defined Slerf and his community.”
Slerf has since become deeply entrenched in meme coin lore, with traders turning the original “oh fuck” post into a meme and using it as copy-pasta in the épée trenches. Luckily for them, the story now has a happy ending – at least for those who lost money during the pre-sale.
“I told you we’d complete the 10 million Slerf refunds,” Grumpy posted on X. “Now I tell you that Slerf will be an S-tier memecoin.”
With a market capitalization of $28.1 million under the new contract address, according to DEX screenerthe meme coin still has a long way to go to regain the hype it once had.
Daily debriefing Newsletter
Start every day with today’s top news stories, plus original articles, a podcast, videos and more.