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Twenty-three-year-old Arnold Robert Haro addressed his final words to the phone in his hand. “If I die, I hope you guys turn this into a memecoin,” he said. Then Haro took his own life.
Haro died on February 21 at his family home in Madera County, California, a death certificate obtained by WIRED shows. His suicide was broadcast live to his followers on X, where he went by the handle @MistaFuccYou. Footage of Haro’s death has since been removed from the platform, but the incident was briefly listed in its trending tab.
In the hours after Haro’s death, people created dozens of memecoins—a type of highly volatile crypto coin used as a vector for financial speculation—modeled after him. Sensing an opportunity to profit, traders piled into one of the coins in particular, driving its value to $2.1 million in aggregate. (The coin has since lost 96 percent of its value.)
On X, some tried to argue that whoever was behind the MistaFuccYou coin had duly granted Haro’s final wish. But most denounced the impulse among traders to try to profit by his death. “If you’re trading this, you’re sick af,” wrote one user.
Speculation ran rampant on X that Haro had ended his life because he had lost money to a memecoin rugpull—a maneuver whereby somebody creates a new coin, promotes it online, then sells off their holdings in one swoop, devaluing everyone else’s stake. WIRED was unable to confirm whether this had happened to Haro, but his friends have disputed the narrative. “It had nothing to do with crypto … It’s not what all these crypto nerds seem to think,” one of Haro’s friends, who goes by j nova on social media, told WIRED. Haro’s family, meanwhile, has described his death as the result of “his battle with depression.”
The incident captures in microcosm the race to the bottom in memecoin trading circles, where only the most heinous and morally bankrupt ideas are now rewarded with attention, says Azeem Khan, cofounder of the Morph blockchain and venture partner at crypto VC firm Foresight Ventures.
“We’ve reached the point where the most potentially exciting launch that people are looking at is Kanye trying to launch a Swastika coin,” says Khan, in reference to now-deleted X posts made by an account associated with the artist Kanye West. “That’s how terrible this space is.”
Until last year, launching a memecoin was relatively expensive and technically burdensome, which meant few came to market. Only Dogecoin—the original memecoin—and a handful of derivatives had any sort of longevity.
That equation was reversed with the arrival of Pump.Fun, a platform that makes it simple for anyone to launch a memecoin at no cost. Since Pump.Fun launched in January 2024, many millions of memecoins have flooded the market, among them the coins modeled after Haro.