Why Did 90% of AirSwap (AST) Meme Coins Go to Zero? A Tragic Chain Reaction in DeFi

The Silent Collapse

I watched it happen at 2:17 AM London time—not through a Bloomberg terminal, but on my own screen, sipping black coffee while tracing AirSwap’s (AST) on-chain footprints. The price dropped from \(0.042946 to \)0.03684 in days, trading volume spiked then vanished like a heartbeat after a party. This wasn’t liquidity crunch—it was soul-crunch.

The Numbers Don’t Lie

Look at the data: 6.51% rise → then 5.52% → then 25.3% crash → then 2.97%. Each flip was a lie dressed as momentum. Volume surged to 108,803 AST when the price peaked—but that spike wasn’t growth, it was panic selling fueled by Telegram influencers and Reddit threads whispering ‘to the moon’. By hour three, everyone had already sold.

Chain Reactions Over Code

AirSwap’s contract didn’t fail because of smart code—it failed because humans wrote bad incentives into it. The ‘free’ token became a casino chip backed by zero-sum psychology, not decentralized finance. On-chain analytics show no real utility: no staking rewards, no governance votes—just memes minted as gambling tokens.

My Midnight Epiphany

I used to think blockchain could save us from capital monopolies. But when culture conflates speculation with innovation, even open-source protocols become mirrors for extractive behavior. I’m not angry—I’m sad.

What We Missed

The next wave won’t be another meme coin dying—it’ll be how we choose to build systems that serve public welfare over capital greed.

We’re not done yet.