Unlucky Trader Fumbles $36 Million on Troll Solana Meme Coin

A trader has fumbled a $36 million trade by selling his portion of the Solana meme coin TROLL last summer.

At the time of the sale, the token was at a market capitalization of $9,360. Now, almost a year later, it has suddenly skyrocketed to $158 million.

Solana meme coin dev Leland King Fawcette, best known for travelling through all 50 U.S. states in record time for a token, told Decrypt that he was the one who missed out on the multi-million dollar trade. According to on-chain data, Fawcette spent approximately $1,300 in August 2024 and sold it for about the same price a couple of hours later.

Fawcette proved his connection to the selling wallet to Decrypt via a handshake transfer from the wallet that the selling wallet moved funds to.

“I first bundled TROLL back on August 11th, 2024. I wanted to simply shill a meme coin to a KOL that I had a ton of supply of on multiple wallets just to see if any KOL was dumb enough to do it. No KOL except one bought it,” Fawcette told Decrypt. “So I dumped on his copy traders, made by 9 SOL, and forgot about the coin.”

On August 11, TROLL pumped to a $9,360 market capitalization before dumping 52% to $4,480, presumably as Fawcette’s scheme took place.

For eight months, the Troll meme coin lay dormant, peaking at a market cap of $24,000. Until it exploded by more than 174,948% in April 2025 to a peak of $42 million.

Around this time, the X account of the artist behind the original Trollface meme, Carlos Ramirez,  who’s known online as Saint Whynne, promoted a rival Troll meme coin, which peaked at a $14 million market cap. This didn’t last long as the token had plummeted 99% in value by May, and Whynne deleted their posts. It now sits at a market cap of just $142,630.

Meanwhile, the other TROLL coin spent May, June, and most of July consolidating between $10 million and $27.65 million as a cult-like community formed. Then the token surged 924.65% over 10 days, starting July 26, to an all-time high market cap of $166 million. It has since retraced slightly to $158 million.

If Fawcette had held his tokens throughout this journey, which is admittedly hard, he would have profited more than $36 million from a $1,300 buy—or a 2,769,131% return. But, fortunately, he doesn’t seem to be taking it too badly.

“I’ll be real, it doesn’t hurt that I [sold] TROLL because I [sold] it back in August, and the coin started running in April,” Fawcette told Decrypt. “So the feeling of destruction, the feeling of hatred, the feeling of why did I [sell], that doesn’t really exist for me. Because it was a single meme coin on a platform with millions of meme coins. Secondly, there was no indication that the coin was going to run.”

Troll was created on the popular launchpad Pump.fun, which, according Dune data, has been responsible for more than 12 million meme coins since January 2024.

At the time Fawcette was selling his tokens, Troll was just a drop in the ocean. Now, it is the platform’s 9th-largest token and the 39th-largest meme coin in the world.