James Wynn, a trader who became rich relying on meme coin PEPE, recently experienced a setback after promoting another meme coin, ELON, which led to a sudden collapse in its price. While investors criticized him for his actions, it also gave us more food for thought.
In the wake of the trust crisis surrounding ELON, James Wynn’s calls for meme coins seemed to lose their effectiveness. In recent days, the MONKE coin that he promoted 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 (although his secondary address managed to recover the cost as it moved faster).
How to become a meme coin guru is perhaps the ultimate question for every meme player. Even if becoming a guru is not achievable for many players, following in the footsteps of successful traders, known as “copy trading,” seems to be a shortcut for many. Today, PANews attempts to unravel the secrets of the meme game through an online investigation of James Wynn, the legendary meme player of PEPE coin.
Among the many legendary hunters of meme coins, James Wynn (@JamesWynnReal) has recently been the center of attention. First, it was discovered through Lookonchain monitoring that he made $12.8 million from PEPE (in fact, PANews found that it was even more), which caused a heated discussion in the industry.
Subsequently, James Wynn took full advantage of this wave of attention and made a high-profile call for the ELON token. After selling at a high price and leaving a comment saying, “There are problems with the project,” the market plummeted more than 70%, which also attracted criticism from fans.
Through data analysis of 26 wallet addresses related to James Wynn, PANews calculated that he made approximately $25 million from the surge in PEPE tokens, with an initial investment of only $7,644. During the promotion of ELON token, James Wynn’s actions also raised suspicions of manipulating and dumping on followers.
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 choose 1 or 2 addresses, as meme coins are all about gambling with small amounts in the hope of big returns. Thus, the amount of capital invested or the number of wallet addresses prepared would not be too significant.
However, during James Wynn’s trading of PEPE coin, he used a maximum of 26 wallet addresses, while only three addresses were publicly known beforehand.
Wallet address analysis of James Wynn
According to PANews’ investigation, James Wynn has a deep connection with PEPE coin.
PEPE coin was officially launched on April 14, 2023, and James Wynn’s Twitter account was registered in April 2023. Before April 16th, he had not sent any tweets. His earliest tweet was promoting 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 completing the initial layout, James Wynn quickly promoted PEPE on Twitter, posting at least 24 promotional content on April 16 alone. For an ordinary player, this seemed to be excessive.
As the popularity of PEPE grew on social media, some meme communities took notice of this token. More PEPE enthusiasts emerged, driving up the price. From April 16 to April 19, PEPE experienced approximately 1-2 times growth each day.
On April 17, James Wynn sold the initial investment, and then re-purchased a small amount with one of his accounts on April 18. By May 1, 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 17, the remaining PEPE coins were transferred to two addresses. Then, these two addresses sold batches of PEPE coins for ETH, which were then consolidated into the address 0xbC6D62D318Da4fD5146C80d0b73908Ad7793Ea1A. From there, the funds were transferred to James Wynn’s main wallet, jwynn.eth, and finally, a portion of the funds were transferred to exchange addresses using the main wallet address.
In James Wynn’s transactions, he seemed to deliberately avoid the association between the four initial buying addresses. The association between these addresses was only discovered after penetrating through 6-7 layers of wallets.
According to PANews’ analysis, James Wynn subsequently deposited 1,771 ETH, $168,900 USDC, and PEPE coins worth $3.94 million into various centralized exchanges. Currently, the total value of his assets on the blockchain is approximately $15.38 million, with a total profit of about $25.33 million.
If James Wynn’s exaggerated profits seem difficult to believe as mere luck, it is worth noting that before he became successful with PEPE, he was just an average player with wallet interactions involving small amounts, usually around a few dozen dollars. However, when it came to trading PEPE, he suddenly became aggressive. Furthermore, these wallet addresses were mostly established after trading PEPE, except for three addresses that had long-term interactions on the Binance chain. Perhaps he received some kind of inspiration or insider information that led to his first successful bet on the Ethereum blockchain.
A hardworking millionaire, selling while promoting
Even after amassing millions of dollars 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 to more people, his number of fans increased to 19,000 within a year. Due to his achievements with PEPE, he was revered as the PEPE guru in the community.
One year after James Wynn’s first purchase of PEPE, on April 24, 2024, at 4:38 p.m., he posted another tweet on Twitter: “I feel like I have a 1000x for you, who wants it?” About an hour before he tweeted this, he had just finished positioning two accounts in the ELON token, which had just been listed for less than half an hour.
As usual, James Wynn promptly released relevant information about the ELON token and promoted it with various praises, showing the same enthusiasm as his endorsement of PEPE last year. A year later, James Wynn’s influence was extraordinary, and many bloggers specializing in meme coins followed his calls.
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 his sincerity to be in the same trenches as his fans or because he genuinely believed that ELON could become the next PEPE, James Wynn added to his position after the significant rise in ELON’s price.
However, the price trend did not replicate PEPE’s meteoric rise. On the evening of April 25, ELON only increased slightly from the previous day’s high before starting to decline. Around 35 minutes past midnight on April 27, the price of ELON suddenly dropped by 70%. James Wynn subsequently announced on Twitter that he had liquidated his positions and stated that there were some problems with the ELON token.
It was only then that people realized that James Wynn’s sell-off had caused the price crash. According to PANews’ findings, James Wynn not only positioned the well-known address jwynn.eth but also quietly bought ELON using another rarely used address, 0x4afed6cd4e65589a43f64dad86650b8ac6fc3662, and this account had already liquidated on April 25 at 3 a.m., when James Wynn’s tweets about promoting ELON were flying across social media like snowflakes.
According to statistics, James Wynn ranked among the top ten in terms of profitability in this operation with both accounts (ranking second and eighth), earning approximately $350,000. However, this profit seemed to fall short of James Wynn’s ideal state, as he had already started promoting several other projects.
Perhaps, at this point, we can return to the two questions mentioned at the beginning. How to become a meme guru? James Wynn’s path to becoming a guru seems to have little to do with the traditional technical aspects of meme gameplay and more like a classic marketing case.
As for the second question, is following such a guru a shortcut? Perhaps those users who experienced the ELON crash already have their own answer.
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