WolvesDAO’s WOOF Token Launch on Avalanche

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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 dropped 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, contributing to the quick price plunge.

Others, like investor and gaming influencer Jonah Blake, chose to buy the token later because they liked the team and didn’t mind the risk of losing money. In WOOF’s early hours on GeckoTerminal, some “whales” sold significant amounts (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 that same day. Together, they sold off about $143,000 worth of WOOF. Between 10:45 am and noon, two more whale wallets sold.

This selling isn’t that much considering its market cap was around $16 million at launch. There were also several “dolphins” who sold between $5K and $10K.

While there was a slight rebound Friday afternoon, by Friday night, the price began to trend downward again.

By Sunday afternoon, WOOF hit its lowest point at around $0.005, plummeting another 42% from Saturday to Sunday during a weekend selloff.

This pattern of a rapid pump followed by a long decline towards zero is common with memecoins. However, WOOF wasn’t intended to be just a memecoin. Its price action mirrors what happened with another gaming token, CGX, which also launched recently 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 existed for years. The founders use their real names and have worked within the blockchain gaming space for some time.

One founder, Payton Kaleiwahea, has previously explained how the token is meant to serve as an access token for WolvesDAO’s upcoming AI agent for blockchain gaming data searches, which aims to deliver a better game discovery experience than Twitter or Google Search.

So, why did the token fall so quickly?

One self-described “Avax degen” mentioned, “WAKE UP. It’s not the project; it’s the market.” Launching a token has always been risky, making it difficult to shift away from the current memecoin mindset.
You must really trust the team behind it, but even a trustworthy team can’t guarantee financial success (consider the many NFTs I acquired in 2021).

KAITO was one of the tokens recently bucking this trend, showing more price resilience than other new tokens, though it’s down 30% in the past week.

People can’t be blamed for selling part or all of their WOOF allocation; predicting the actions of the team, whales, or holders can be challenging. Selling part of an allocation or swapping to stablecoins is one way to manage risk with a low-cap coin.

I applied and received 40,000 WOOF. I swapped half into USDC on Avalanche, which was under $300, and plan to possibly swap again later. Currently, I still hold 20,000 WOOF, which was worth about $300 a few days ago but is now valued at around $100.

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