WolvesDAO’s WOOF token struggles after launch

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WolvesDAO’s gaming and AI token WOOF launched on Avalanche on Friday — and quickly crashed in price.

It went live around 10 am ET. Within two hours, it went from $0.041 to $0.009, according to its chart on GeckoTerminal.

That’s a 78% price dump in 120 minutes. Some on Crypto Twitter have accused “insiders and organizers” of selling early and contributing to the quick price plunge.

Others, like investor and gaming influencer Jonah Blake, have decided to buy the token well after the fact because they like the team (and admittedly don’t care if they lose that money). Looking at the history of WOOF in its earliest hours on GeckoTerminal reveals that some “whales” did sell (wallets with over $10K in WOOF). I counted 10 whales selling between 10:18 am ET, shortly after the token launched, until 10:45 am the same day.

Together, they sold off about $143,000 worth of WOOF combined. Between 10:45 am and noon, two more whale wallets sold.

That’s not that much, though, considering its market cap was around $16 million at launch. There were also a lot of “dolphins” selling between $5K and $10K, too.

While there was a small rebound Friday afternoon, by Friday night the token’s price was more or less trending downward.

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By Sunday afternoon, it hit the closest to zero it had ever been, at around $0.005, plummeting another 42% from Saturday to Sunday in a weekend selloff.

Thing is, this price action of a fast pump and then a long, painful decline toward zero has happened time and time again with memecoins.

But WOOF wasn’t intended to be a memecoin. Its price action and shifting sentiment so far reminds me of what happened with another gaming-related token, CGX, which launched 18 days ago and is down about 84% from its all-time high.

WolvesDAO is an exclusive gaming-focused Discord server and community with about 300 members that has been around for years. The founders use their real names and have been around in the blockchain gaming space working with different projects or independently for a while.

One of the founders, Payton Kaleiwahea, has shared both publicly and previously with me how the token is going to be an access token for WolvesDAO’s upcoming AI agent for blockchain gaming data searches. The agent will have access to “proprietary data” and could offer a better game discovery experience than Twitter or Google Search.

So why did the token fall so fast?

One self-described “Avax degen” said what I think is going on here: “WAKE UP. It’s not the project, it’s the market.”

Launching a token has been and will always be risky. It’s hard to get people out of the current memecoin mindset. You also have to really trust the team behind it, but even if the team is full of trustworthy, ethical people, it may not pan out financially (like so many of my NFTs from 2021).

KAITO was one of the tokens that bucked the trend recently. It’s been more resilient price-wise than other new tokens coming to market. But it’s down 30% in the past week.

But I also don’t blame people for selling part or all of their WOOF allocation. It’s difficult to really predict what the team, whales or holders are going to do, and selling part of an allocation or swapping it into stablecoins is one way to potentially de-risk with a low-cap coin.

I applied and was granted 40,000 WOOF. I’ve since swapped half into USDC on Avalanche, which was less than $300, with potential plans to swap that again at some point. I still have 20,000 WOOF in my wallet. It was worth another $300 a few days ago, but it’s now worth about $100.

I reached out to Wolves co-founders Kaleiwahea and Sam Steffanina for their thoughts on the token’s weekend action.

“We feel pretty decent all things considered, tough market and we missed the Avax meta by about 36 hours, so that sucks,” Steffanina told me in a DM. “That said, we’re building real products and have enough from presale to actually build the things we want to build, which was our main focus.”

Kaleiwahea added: “We are excited for what we are building with the AI agent and also for the companion app. People who believe in us, as the Wolves did, will have all my effort in bringing value to that decision.”

On Saturday, Kaleiwahea shared on Twitter that IRL events are planned next: “You thought we would take off over the weekend? Lol, you will learn soon enough.”

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