Bubblemaps ties X article contest winner to Solana memecoin rug pulls

The dispute involving the winner of X’s “Articles” contest comes as the platform tries to push longer posts and creator payouts. In January, X said it would pay $1 million for the best long-form article, with the main metric being impressions in the Verified Home Timeline. 

The controversy flared after Bubblemaps published a thread linking @beaverd to a cluster of Solana memecoin launches. In its opening post, the company said the activity could point to repeated pump-and-dump behavior and roughly $600,000 in total profit. 

As one example, Bubblemaps pointed to a Pump.fun token called $SIAS. The team said it traced activity to a public address and then to a wallet labeled 2mQB8o, which it described as the token’s deployer. Bubblemaps said $SIAS briefly climbed to around a $6 million market cap before sharply collapsing, and that the token’s social accounts were later removed. 

Bubblemaps then described the pattern it considers central to the allegation. In its account, several related wallets “sniped” $SIAS, buying immediately after launch while the price was still low. Some of those wallets sold before the downturn, while later buyers were left holding a token that rapidly lost liquidity and value. Bubblemaps said the profit in that case could have been around $600,000. 

In plain terms, the claim is this: the same wallet cluster allegedly launches memecoins, captures most of the early upside in the first minutes or hours, then exits, after which the price for everyone else falls close to zero. In crypto slang, that’s often called a “rug pull,” though the term can be used loosely, and the facts in each case ultimately depend on what the on-chain transactions show.

The accusations also land in a sensitive spot for Solana’s memecoin scene. Low fees and fast confirmation times make Solana an easy venue for rapid-fire token launches, but that convenience has also come with a wave of short-lived coins and suspected manipulative patterns. A Solidus report said the vast majority of tokens launched on Pump.fun and a significant share of Raydium pools showed indicators consistent with pump-and-dump or rug-pull-style behavior.

@beaverd responded to the allegations with a post saying “cry me a river,” adding that the examples shown supposedly “don’t even make the top five.” As of the time Bubblemaps’ thread circulated, there was no point-by-point rebuttal addressing the specific wallets, and X had not issued a public comment on the claims.