Before committing suicide live on X, Arnold Haro had a request: "If I die, I hope you guys turn this into a meme coin." His dying wish came true. Haro’s followers created a meme coin that skyrocketed in value to $2 million. WSJ's Kevin Dugan digs into a seedy online world where anything can be turned into crypto. Annie Minoff hosts. Further Listening: - Inside the Trump Crypto Bromance Sign up for WSJ’s free What’s News newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What tragic event inspired the creation of a meme coin?
In late February, a man started a live stream on X. He's on his phone.
You see him. He's wearing a white T-shirt. He's got gold chains on. And he starts talking to the camera.
The man's name, Arnold Harrow.
You can see that he's feeling much more anxiety as it's going on. He's like scratching his head.
Then Harrow holds a bullet up to the camera.
Then he puts the bullet into the chamber of Smith & Wesson. And he spins the chamber. And he looks at it. And you could see that he's in a lot of distress.
Haro was playing Russian roulette. And then he made a request to his followers.
If I die, I hope you guys turn this into a meme coin.
Haro killed himself on that live stream. He was 23 years old. And in a matter of hours, his dying request, turn this into a meme coin, came true.
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Chapter 2: Who was Arnold Haro and what was his online presence like?
Arnold's family described him as a goofball, someone who was very generous, someone who, as recently as Valentine's Day, was sending money to family members who needed it.
To get a better picture of Haro's life, Kevin spoke to his family and reviewed police records. Haro's sister disputes some of the information in those police records, but declined to get specific. A few things from those interviews and records stood out to Kevin. According to police reports, Haro's ex-girlfriend said that he was a part-time drug dealer and user.
And according to his family, Haro struggled with depression.
So it seemed like he had a little bit of a volatile life.
That was offline. But online, on X, Haro's life was also pretty volatile.
He had a bit of a following. I think some of what he was known for was a little bit of his edgy humor. He liked to push buttons. And he would do that sometimes by using a lot of language that could include, you know, racial slurs and things like that. There's one video that went mildly viral in some parts of Twitter where he was spinning around and throwing up. And he was called the 360 puke guy.
So that was the kind of level of humor that he was involved in.
On X, Haro often posted about trades he made on the crypto market, particularly meme coins. Meme coins are a fast-growing part of crypto. They first started way back in 2013, with an image of a smiling, animated dog.
So the first meme coin was Dogecoin, and it started off as a joke. The whole project of Doge was a little bit of like, look, you can create something that has no intrinsic value. And instead of becoming worthless and just being something to laugh about online, it actually accumulated a lot of value because it was just a joke.
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Chapter 3: What are meme coins and how did they originate?
Chapter 4: How did Arnold Haro's meme coin gain value?
Haro killed himself on that live stream. He was 23 years old. And in a matter of hours, his dying request, turn this into a meme coin, came true.
Someone created a meme coin that was named after his social media handle. And very quickly, that coin took off.
The cryptocurrency named after Haro skyrocketed in value to $2 million. Our colleague Kevin Dugan covers the culture of finance. He heard about Haru's suicide earlier this year. And it surprised him how easily a tragedy like this could be transformed into an asset.
there's already this infrastructure that's available that can just take something, take anything and financialize it. And to me, this felt genuinely new and it felt like it was something much darker than I had ever really seen before. And that was why I wanted to kind of explore this and see what was actually happening.
Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Annie Minoff. It's Thursday, May 1st. Coming up on the show, the seedy underbelly of meme coins, where anything is for sale. Arnold Haro lived in Central California. He worked in the solar industry and had a one-year-old daughter with an ex-girlfriend.
Arnold's family described him as a goofball, someone who was very generous, someone who, as recently as Valentine's Day, was sending money to family members who needed it.
To get a better picture of Haro's life, Kevin spoke to his family and reviewed police records. Haro's sister disputes some of the information in those police records, but declined to get specific. A few things from those interviews and records stood out to Kevin. According to police reports, Haro's ex-girlfriend said that he was a part-time drug dealer and user.
And according to his family, Haro struggled with depression.
So it seemed like he had a little bit of a volatile life.
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Chapter 5: What is the culture behind meme coins and why do people invest in them?
Enter PumpFun.
PumpFun is a marketplace where people can sell, buy, and make meme coins really quickly.
It started in 2024. And essentially what it does is it allows you to create cryptocurrencies, meme coins specifically, about as easily as you could create a blog on Tumblr, right? You just click a button, you add a picture, you put in a name, and it doesn't take much more than that. And all of a sudden, you can start having a...
cryptocurrency based off an internet joke, trading to anybody who wants to buy it.
Within seconds? Yeah, just about. Can you show me what this looks like?
Yeah. Here's the app.
The first thing you see on PumpFun is a pop-up asking you to certify that you're at least 18 years old before entering the site. Once you're in, the site itself is pretty lo-fi. It has a black background with bright green accents. There are moving GIFs, emojis, and colorful tickers logging new transactions.
And the site is littered with offensive user-generated images and slurs, like the N-word, it's everywhere. It's like I need to wash my eyeballs now.
Yeah. You see a lot of that.
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Chapter 6: What is PumpFun and how does it facilitate meme coin creation?
Chapter 7: How big is the market for meme coins and what are some notable examples?
Well, and presumably, if you were hip to the fart joke early, you could buy your farts and sell them, and maybe you'd have like a nice little bag of change then. Yes, exactly. Since I talked to Kevin, Fartcoin's market cap has actually grown to over a billion dollars. The coin was created on a particularly popular site in the world of meme coins.
Enter PumpFun.
PumpFun is a marketplace where people can sell, buy, and make meme coins really quickly.
It started in 2024. And essentially what it does is it allows you to create cryptocurrencies, meme coins specifically, about as easily as you could create a blog on Tumblr, right? You just click a button, you add a picture, you put in a name, and it doesn't take much more than that. And all of a sudden, you can start having a...
cryptocurrency based off an internet joke, trading to anybody who wants to buy it.
Within seconds? Yeah, just about. Can you show me what this looks like?
Yeah. Here's the app.
The first thing you see on PumpFun is a pop-up asking you to certify that you're at least 18 years old before entering the site. Once you're in, the site itself is pretty lo-fi. It has a black background with bright green accents. There are moving GIFs, emojis, and colorful tickers logging new transactions.
And the site is littered with offensive user-generated images and slurs, like the N-word, it's everywhere. It's like I need to wash my eyeballs now.
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