Crypto token plunges 70%, taking market cap below $1 billion

By Nora Redmond

MemeCore's M token plunged 72% on Thursday.

MemeCore's M token saw a considerable plunge on Wednesday night - with no obvious reason for investors.

The utility token, which gives investors access to a company's product or service, declined by 72% - from $2.618 to $0.8188 - first slumping by 75% in five minutes at 8:40 p.m. Eastern, according to cryptocurrency price-tracking website CoinMarketCap.

The coin's valuation has now dropped below its previous market capitalization of $1 billion. Its fully diluted valuation, a metric for measuring the total value of a crypto project if all tokens are in circulation, fell from about $14 billion to $3.8 billion.

After the sudden crash, blockchain investigator ZachXBT wrote in a post on Telegram that he and two other crypto sleuths had highlighted on social-media platform X "a number of red flags" about MemeCore, the provider of $M. "The community needs answers from Binance & Bybit about why M was listed for perps and why Kraken & Bitget listed M spot as these highly manipulated tokens continue to give our industry a bad reputation and extract from retail," he said.

It comes after ZachXBT previously published accusations in a response to a post on X at the end of April, questioning how the Singapore-based blockchain service managed to pass due diligence to list $M on U.S.-based crypto trading platform Kraken.

He claimed that insiders had "manipulated the price" of the token, and criticized its alleged distribution.

MemeCore first launched the M token at the beginning of July last year, with trading against the U.S. dollar first made available on six different platforms, including Kraken and Bitget.

When first announcing the new token, the group described it as "the engine behind MemeCore's viral economy."

MemeCore and Kraken did not immediately respond to MarketWatch's requests for comment.

-Nora Redmond

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06-25-26 0737ET