It was late March when a new crypto coin called Boomer—a reference to the affluent, senior demographic that’s largely clueless about cryptocurrencies—launched on Coinbase’s growing blockchain called Base.
Boomer Coin had attracted the attention (and cash) of a community of veteran crypto market participants who appreciated the coin’s meme, which poked good-natured fun at the generation of older folks who have capital, but are mostly strangers to the crypto world. Meanwhile, some major industry players forecast as much as $300 billion of Baby Boomer generation money will enter the crypto market within the next year, as an expected new bull market gets underway.
Most of the Boomer Coin community were successful and tech-savvy business executives and entrepreneurs who’d been through their share of battles with crypto pump-and-dump scammers. A main part of the attraction for them to the Boomer meme came from a shared desire to educate real-life Baby Boomers and other normies about how to safely participate in crypto markets.
Rug Pull
With their knowledge of crypto-market mechanics, the Boomer community were quick to recognize signs in the coin’s initial trading action that something didn’t look right. The problem didn’t have anything to do with the Base chain—that was working fine.
Instead, the trading patterns were exhibiting all the classic signs of a “rug pull.” The community began to suspect the developer who created Boomer Coin and its meme content was sniping the price action, selling into the market through a multitude of separate wallets.
Sure enough, after a relentless series of sales that drove the coin’s price down, while pocketing the developer enough dough to maybe buy a Lamborghini, he fessed up in an open message to the community that he didn’t want anything more to do with the project.
If the community wanted the keys to the Boomer website, Discord and Telegram channels, it was all theirs. The dev was out.
Have a nice life, bagholders!
Self-Doxxing Community
Typically, that would be the end of the story for a meme coin—just another rug pool for the books, another war story to file under the category of “Win Some, Lose Some.” But the community that had grown together around the Boomer meme’s positive mission were no ordinary group of crypto day traders. These were savvy and persistent professionals, executives and entrepreneurs who didn’t quit or roll over easy.
A couple dozen of them quickly organized a live Google meet to put their heads together about how to save the Boomer community’s shared mission to provide education to newbs on how to participate in the crypto space safely. In a way, the group’s shared determination not to allow the project to fail would itself be self-proof of the power of community over quick-buck scammers.
Remarkably, all the participants in the emergency Google Meet had their cameras turned on! They were willing to show their faces and identities in public—a rare quality in the crypto space, where aliases and avatars reign supreme.
This group was boldly doxing itself for the entire world to see.
Victory from Defeat
Fast forward a month to today. Far from the typical smoking ash heap which is all that’s usually left from a crypto pump-and-dump scheme, the Boomer community has rallied with astounding resilience.
Their plans to prevent the project’s destruction, first formulated as they faced the impending crisis during their initial Google Meet, have succeeded in not only keeping the Boomer project alive but in engineering a remarkable reversal of momentum.
Combining their collective knowledge, skills and resources, the Boomer community have rescued the project from almost certain failure. They’ve continued producing entertaining meme content and educational resources, while holding their Boomer coins and contributing their time and financial resources to advance a mission of onboarding the next 10 million Boomers safely into crypto markets.
Boomer Coin’s price has appreciated since its market debut in late March. Its code base recently passed rigorous security testing with flying colors. Boomer coin also received a perfect score of 100-out-of-100 from Token Sniffer, the established authority on smart-contract security that was recently cited by the U.S. Department of the Treasury, as well as in testimonies before the Senate Banking Committee.
Major Credibility
During an April 23 event hosted by Coinbase, some Boomer community members, including the CEO of a San Francisco-based tech company, had the opportunity to meet with Jesse Pollak, the company’s former head of consumer engineering, who also created the Base chain and currently leads its team.
Base, where $Boomer trades, offers a safe, low-cost, developer-friendly way to build on-chain. It’s a major part of Coinbase’s mission as a publicly traded, SEC-regulated company to create an open financial system that increases economic freedom globally, a goal shared by the Boomer community.
After hearing the story of the Boomer community’s against-all-odds victory over a shady developer, and its mission to educate the newbie population about how to participate in crypto safely, Pollak hit the “buy” button on some $Boomer. Several other Coinbase team members piled onto the Boomer Coin train, as well. It was, of course, a moral victory and a validation for the community from some of the crypto world’s most accomplished and brilliant innovators.
Rick Grimes, a practicing cancer surgeon and outspoken member of the Boomer community, says it’s a shared desire to educate Boomers about crypto and the Base chain, and to recognize potential scams, that unites the group and makes it unique. “We want to help new users adopt and understand blockchain technologies in a safe way with a fun community,” the doctor says.
