Once again, meme coin degenerates invest in questionable tokens. It comes amid Sam Bankman-Fried’s (SBF) historic sentencing with a 25-year prison time.

On March 28, Judge Lewis Kaplan sentenced SBF to prison for seven counts of fraud for the collapse of FTX in November 2022. This is dubbed as one of the biggest corporate collapses in American history, the former CEO is the first person from the company to go to prison.

Meme coins surrounding SBF

A developer launched a meme coin called Sam Baseman Fraud just hours before Bankman-Fried’s sentence was handed down. Humorously sporting the ticker FTX on the Coinbase layer-2 network Base.

In a mere seven-hour time span, FTX rallied 23,300%, reaching a market capitalization of $1.5 million, according to DexScreener.

Typical of meme coins, the token sold off harshly within three hours, dumping more than 85% of its price. As of publication, the meme coin is trading around $0.003. It is still up over 8,369% though.

Two hours after the sentencing, another SBF-themed memecoin called Som Bonkmon Fraud launched on Solana.

The Solana-based SBF meme coin has grown more than 18,000% from its launch value of $30,000 to a market cap of around $20 million. However, it sold off quickly, plummeting 95% from its peak.

Bankman-themed coins are the latest in a line of topical meme coins inspired by politicians and crypto icons. Other political meme coins have tried to capitalize on the attention around the upcoming election like Boden and Tremp.

Meme market resurgence

After the price of Dog Wif Hat (WIF), a Solana-based meme coin, spiked from $50,000 to $3.5 billion in four months, the meme coin trend saw a major resurgence. As of press time, it is trading at $3.72 surging over 57% in the past week, as per data from CoinGecko.

Other meme tokens have also rallied, like Ethereum’s Pepe on the frog theme and Avalanche’s Coq Inu (COQ) on the rooster theme. PEPE is currently changing hands at $0.057821 and COQ stands at $0.54.

It’s all hype and topical interest with meme coins without utility or base valuation, so they’re hyper-speculative investments.

The meme market cap today is $69.7B, up 9.2% in the last 24 hours. It is still dominated by DOGE which is currently trading at $0.21 with a 36% surge from the previous week and next to it still stands SHIB at $0.000030, up 11% in the past 7 days.

According to CoinGecko, FTX Token (FTT), the native cryptocurrency of the now-defunct exchange also dropped more than 16% following Bankman-Fried’s sentencing.