James Wynn, a trader who made a fortune relying on the meme coin PEPE, recently experienced a setback after promoting another meme coin, ELON. While investors who followed his lead criticized him for causing a market crash, it also gave us more to think about.
After facing a crisis of trust with ELON, James Wynn’s promotional efforts seemed ineffective. In the past few days, the MONKE coin he touted not only failed to skyrocket but also faced selling pressure from retail investors. As of 10 a.m. on April 29th, James Wynn’s own holdings had also turned into losses, while his other account managed to break even.
Becoming a meme coin expert is the ultimate goal for many meme players. Even if becoming an expert seems difficult, following the footsteps of successful players through “copy trading” seems like a shortcut. Today, PANews will explore the secrets of the meme game by tracking the legendary meme player James Wynn and his involvement with the PEPE coin.
Among the many legendary meme coin hunters, James Wynn (@JamesWynnReal) has recently become a hot topic. It started with the discovery of his $12.8 million earnings from PEPE on Lookonchain (PANews actually found that it was more than that), which triggered discussions in the industry.
Subsequently, James Wynn took advantage of this attention and enthusiastically promoted the ELON token. After selling at a high price and leaving a remark stating that the project had issues, the market crashed by over 70%. This caused criticism from his fans.
After analyzing the on-chain data of 26 James Wynn-related wallet addresses, PANews calculated that James Wynn earned approximately $25 million from the surge of the PEPE token, with an initial investment of only $7,644. However, James Wynn’s actions during the promotion of the ELON token indeed raised suspicions of manipulating and dumping the token.
For ordinary meme players, when choosing to buy a meme coin, how many addresses would you use for buying or selling? Most people would probably use only 1 or 2 addresses, considering that meme coins are a high-risk investment. However, during James Wynn’s trading of PEPE, he used up to 26 wallet addresses, while only three addresses were publicly known.
James Wynn’s wallet address analysis revealed a deep connection to the PEPE coin. PEPE coin was launched on April 14, 2023, and James Wynn registered his Twitter account in April 2023. Before April 16th, he had not sent any tweets, and his earliest tweet was promoting the PEPE coin.
Within one day of PEPE’s launch, James Wynn quickly made his first purchase using the address 0x4afed6cd4e65589a43f64dad86650b8ac6fc3662, spending 0.54 ETH. Within 30 minutes, he completed three transactions using three different addresses, buying a total of approximately 4.2 trillion PEPE coins for a total cost of 3.5 ETH, accounting for about 1% of the total supply.
After establishing his initial holdings, James Wynn started promoting PEPE on Twitter, releasing at least 24 promotional tweets on April 16th alone. This level of promotion seemed excessive for an ordinary player.
As the popularity of PEPE increased on social media, more PEPE enthusiasts emerged, driving up the price. From April 16th to April 19th, PEPE experienced daily growth of approximately 1 to 2 times.
On April 17th, James Wynn sold his initial investment, and then repurchased a small amount on April 18th using one of his accounts. By May 1st, the price had increased by 100 times compared to James Wynn’s cost. Perhaps to avoid drawing attention from other players, James Wynn transferred his PEPE coins to multiple new addresses.
For example, the address 0x1996a2Cd7E4f12aF62D637883228Fea805AE0e6d initially purchased 974 billion PEPE coins. After selling some ETH on April 17th, the remaining PEPE coins were transferred to two addresses. Then, these two addresses gradually sold the coins for ETH, which was aggregated to the address 0xbC6D62D318Da4fD5146C80d0b73908Ad7793Ea1A. Finally, the funds were transferred to James Wynn’s main wallet, jwynn.eth, and a portion was sent to exchange addresses.
In James Wynn’s transactions, he seemed to deliberately avoid the connection between the four initial buying addresses. The relationship between these addresses was only discovered after penetrating through 6-7 layers of wallets.
According to PANews’ investigation, James Wynn subsequently deposited 1,771 ETH, $168,900 USDC, and PEPE coins worth $3.94 million into various centralized exchanges. Currently, his on-chain assets amount to approximately $15.38 million, resulting in a total profit of around $25.33 million.
If James Wynn’s exaggerated earnings seem difficult to believe based solely on luck, it is worth noting that before becoming involved with PEPE, James Wynn was an ordinary player with wallet interactions usually involving only a few dollars. However, when he started trading PEPE, he suddenly became aggressive. Additionally, most of these wallet addresses were created after trading PEPE, with only three having a history of interaction on the Binance chain. Perhaps he received some insights or internal information that led to his successful gamble on the Ethereum chain.
A hardworking millionaire, promoting while liquidating
Even after amassing millions in assets, James Wynn did not change his habit of searching for memes and interacting on Twitter. He updated dozens of posts every day. As the story of his sudden wealth became known, James Wynn’s number of followers increased to 19,000 within a year. Due to his PEPE success, he was hailed as the PEPE god within the community.
One year after James Wynn’s first purchase of PEPE, on April 24, 2024, at 4:38 p.m., he released another tweet: “I think I have a 1,000x for you, who wants it?” Just an hour before this tweet, he had completed the positioning of two accounts in the ELON token, which had just been listed for less than half an hour.
As usual, James Wynn immediately started sharing information about the ELON token and praised it extensively, just as he did with PEPE last year. After a year, James Wynn’s influence is extraordinary, and many bloggers specializing in meme coins followed his lead.
A few hours later, the price of the ELON token increased nearly 100 times compared to James Wynn’s cost. Whether it was to show solidarity with his fans or because he genuinely believed that ELON could be the next PEPE, James Wynn added to his position after the significant price increase.
However, the price trend did not replicate the success of PEPE. On the evening of April 25th, ELON only slightly increased from the previous day’s high before starting to decline. Around 35 minutes past midnight on the 27th, the price of ELON suddenly dropped by 70%. James Wynn then announced on Twitter that he had liquidated his position and stated that there were issues with the ELON token.
It was then that everyone realized that James Wynn’s liquidation caused the crash. According to PANews’ findings, James Wynn not only positioned himself through the well-known address jwynn.eth but also secretly bought ELON using an infrequently used address, 0x4afed6cd4e65589a43f64dad86650b8ac6fc3662, and had already liquidated that account on the 25th at 3 a.m. At that time, his tweets promoting ELON were already flooding social media like snowflakes.
According to statistics, James Wynn’s two accounts ranked in the top ten of the profit rankings (in 2nd and 8th place) during this operation, earning approximately $350,000. However, this profit did not seem to meet James Wynn’s expectations, as he had already started promoting several other projects.
Perhaps we can now return to the two questions at the beginning. How to become a meme god? James Wynn’s path to success seems to have little to do with traditional meme gameplay techniques and more like a classic marketing case.
As for the second question, is following such a god a shortcut? Perhaps the users who experienced the ELON crash already have their answer.
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