$CATE, one of the most talked-about meme coins on Solana, surged from a market cap of over $20 million to as high as $80 million in just over a week, then crashed 65% within a single minute last night:
For seasoned on-chain veterans, such a price movement from a memecoin would be nothing surprising. But when this happens to a spotlight coin, it’s quite dramatic—and once again reveals some harsh realities of today’s market.
Harsh reality
Let’s start with why this coin crashed so sharply. Players can all point to reasons for this massive plunge:
- The X account for $CATE was suddenly suspended.
- FOMO is down; users cannot trade during the outage.
It’s easy to understand why the X account was banned, but why did the FOMO outage cause this coin to crash?
Because, just as $ANSEM relies on Ansem’s traffic and public endorsement, $CATE relies on the traffic and public endorsement of “Little Ansem,” Poorgoat.
Poorgoat, a member of the FOMO Hall of Fame (recognized by FOMO for achieving substantial profits on the platform), ranked #1 on the 7-day profit leaderboard and #2 on the 30-day profit leaderboard. He entered $CATE at an average price corresponding to a market cap of approximately $1.4 million, with a total investment of around $44,700. At the peak price of the token, this single trade generated profits exceeding $2 million.
He gained fame by holding onto an $ANSEM airdrop worth $30,000 and turning it into nearly $1.75 million at its peak. He now has over 208,000 followers on FOMO.
By now, you should understand why the FOMO outage is widely considered a key factor in the coin’s crash—because, at its core, this coin offers no novel narrative; it’s simply Doge’s “little sister cat,” and even Doge’s creator has publicly denied any association with the coin:
Moreover, the same narrative on the Ethereum mainnet has existed for a considerable time and shows no signs of revival:
This crash drew additional controversy because Poorgoat, currently the top traffic driver on FOMO, essentially acted as the CTO of this coin and wrote a lengthy post on X asserting that the coin was “organic”:
However, an "organic" coin with over 60,000 holding addresses was dropped by more than 60% in just one minute due to a trading volume of less than $1.5 million:
This is the harsh reality we must face. In today’s market, any token that has pursued an organic community-building path—excluding those that previously stood out in earlier environments, such as $SPX and $MOG—may have a ceiling of only around $17 million in market cap, similar to $neet’s current valuation. We won’t elaborate extensively here on why $neet is considered organic; simply examine its price movement over the past 460+ days, and the truth becomes clear:
Next, let’s discuss why FOMO has sparked such significant controversy this time.
Fame attracts controversy.
In fact, at the beginning of this year, when the "Nietzsche Penguin," $PENGUIN, surged 6,000 times in a week and brought fame to trader logjam, who now has around $138,000 in FOMO trading, logjam’s performance was widely admired. At that time, logjam earned approximately $564,000 in profit from $PENGUIN, and no one doubted it—everyone offered recognition and congratulations.
However, after that, the rise of $unc—the pioneer of the “airdrop wealth creation” model, where a small circle distributes tokens and then drives up the price—brought controversy to FOMO. Many of those receiving airdrops were active KOLs on FOMO, whose profits from the airdrops were heavily amplified on the platform, allowing them to dominate weekly and monthly leaderboards and effectively become living billboards for these airdropped tokens. As a result, more users began to suspect that FOMO’s metrics were manipulated, with KOLs colluding to orchestrate pump-and-dump schemes aimed solely at attracting more users to the app, only to abandon them once the goal was achieved and allow the KOLs to cash out.
Whether or not insider trading actually exists, if players can associate it with such behavior, they will despise it—and this is vividly evident on BSC. Moreover, the most plausible explanation for this recent crash of $CATE is that “FOMO broke down.” It’s not because traders believe the coin is inherently tied to FOMO and that its inability to trade is a major negative; rather, the timing was simply too convenient. Many feel this was an excuse to trap and liquidate a large number of users who were trading based on FOMO.
Currently, there are still over 60,000 unique addresses holding $CATE, while FOMO shows more than 38,400 holding addresses for this token—meaning over 60% of the holding addresses originate from FOMO. If so many addresses were created in bulk by FOMO itself, then FOMO would be difficult to separate from suspicions of manipulation. If not, then the retail users on FOMO would suffer the greatest losses.
Another highly controversial issue involves trader MarcellxMarcell, who has nearly 40,000 followers on FOMO, exiting at the top when $CATE had a market cap of approximately $45 million. Although it was still possible to conduct on-chain transactions by exporting the address during the FOMO outage, the community questioned why, after publicly buying in when the market cap was around $30 million—suggesting considerable confidence—he then viewed the FOMO outage as a major negative catalyst.
Recently, Fomo's updated terms of service explicitly stated that they do not guarantee the security of user assets. However, to export a Fomo address, users must log in to Fomo’s website to retrieve their private key—a process that has raised concerns about whether the private key is sufficiently encrypted during transmission to the page.
FOMO's official explanation was system overload due to a surge in users, but many users found this hard to accept, as the trading volume during the 1-minute crash of $CATE was not particularly high. Bro, you raised $75 million in funding—so a trading volume of less than $5 million over 5 minutes brought you down?
If you consistently use on-chain trading terminals like gmgn, you won't get caught off guard by sudden price dumps.
When someone becomes popular, criticism follows—but the backlash FOMO has faced during its rapid development isn't entirely unwarranted.