A meme coin dev accidentally burned $10 million of investor money last year with a single misclick, announcing the mistake on X with a message that’s become part of crypto degen lore: “Oh fuck.”
“There is nothing I can do to fix this,” the pseudonymous dev posted at the time. “I’m so fucking sorry.”
Now, 19 months later, the dev behind Slerf has finally been able to do something to fix it, refunding everyone who participated in the infamous token pre-sale.
In most other industries, setting millions of dollars of investor money on fire would result in strenuous lawsuits, jobs lost, and countless tears. But in crypto, it was turned into a marketing stunt that rallied community support and sent the Slerf token soaring to a $740 million market cap, per DEX Screener.
“It’s been a roller coaster, to say the least,” the Slerf dev, who goes by Grumpy, told Decrypt. “When the burn happened, I honestly had almost no hope of ever recovering the $10 million owed to presalers. It felt like an impossible situation. What kept me going was the community’s response.”
As Slerf migrated its contract to increase its total supply, the meme coin’s X account yesterday announced that it was finally able to finish sending in-kind refunds to everyone who participated in the token pre-sale. The meme coin dev sent a total of 53,359.62 SOL, or $10.3 million, to 25,444 wallets. The funds were collected through a combination of donations and revenue derived from trading fees. The refunds were then slowly rolled out to investors since the burn, with some not realizing they’d even been refunded.
“The refund process ended up taking more than a year, simply because we had to rebuild from nothing,” Grumpy said. “Every bit of donations, revenue, or support we received was directed straight toward making presalers whole again. It’s been 1.8 years of persistence, transparency, and commitment, and I couldn’t be more proud of what the community achieved together.”
Many Slerf pre-sale participants took to X to celebrate their refunds. One posted that Slerf is “the only memecoin that actually kept its promise.” The coin today stands at a market cap of just under $30 million, well below its peak.
It's just for tradition this time. Funds are SAFU.
— Slerf (@Slerfsol) October 21, 2025
The Slerf meme: How’d we get here?
Slerf was a hyped Solana meme coin that attracted $10 million in Solana for its pre-sale—a method used to raise money for tokens before launchpads like Pump.fun gained popularity. Grumpy burned all of these funds, accidentally sending the tokens to an irretrievable address, in what he calls “the biggest mistake of my life.”
As would be expected after losing $10 million of other people’s money, Grumpy told Decrypt that many people were understandably angry. But, ultimately, frustrations appeared to ease as he took accountability for what had happened.
“I went straight to Twitter Spaces to explain what happened and took full accountability for the mistake,” Grumpy told Decrypt. “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 its community.”
Slerf has since become deeply embedded in meme coin lore, with traders turning the initial “oh fuck” post into a meme itself and using it as copy-pasta in the degen trenches. Thankfully for them, the story now has a happy ending—at least for those who lost funds in the pre-sale.
“I told you we would complete the 10m in Slerf refunds,” Grumpy posted on X. “Now I am telling you Slerf will be an S-tier memecoin.”
With a $28.1 million market cap under its new contract address, according to DEX Screener, the meme coin has a long way to go yet to reclaim the hype it once had.
