So something crazy happened with the meme coins after the Charlie Kirk attack. A guy named Evan Rademaker, a 30-year-old executive, was in his office in Tampa when he heard the news. His first instinct was to open X to see what was going on, but the second was to head straight to Pump.fun — you know, that place where tokens of anything appear within minutes.

And of course, it didn’t disappoint. Literally minutes after the event, there were already tokens related to Kirk: prayer token, death token, Kirk’s dog token... people were trying to monetize every angle. Rademaker saw that one called 'RIP Charlie Kirk' had relatively decentralized ownership, so he threw in $30,000. Bad idea — he lost $17,000 when the price dropped. But then it went back up, and he re-entered, and well, it dropped again. Typical meme game.

Things got more interesting when Rademaker found out someone was trying to take control of the token. He contacted the anonymous leader and decided to help. He built a website, made the takeover work, and he and his co-founder said they would donate 100% of the fees in Kirk’s name. They renamed the token 'We Are Charlie Kirk' and started donating serious money — over $100,000 to Kirk-related organizations.

The irony is that for the donation plan to work, they need people to keep buying the token. So the strategy was: mention Musk, Solana co-founders, publicly donate to gain legitimacy. And it worked — Turning Point USA responded, started talking about official cooperation. The token went from being another disposable meme to something that seemed purposeful.

Now the token has a market cap of around $3 million, quite resilient compared to other Kirk tokens that came and went. Rademaker says his goal is for Musk or Trump to mention something — that could instantly boost the market cap to $50 million. Long-term, he wants it to last like DOGE (which is now at $16.92 billion) or PNUT (which is at $55.60 million after all the squirrel stuff).

What’s fascinating is how Pump.fun became the place where every major event generates its own token. It was MOODENG with the hippo, PNUT when Peanut was euthanized, now there are tokens for Trump, for 9/11, for the Ukrainian woman killed on the train. It’s like a pure attention market — no matter how dark the event, someone will create a token about it.

Rademaker admitted he knows this sounds weird — turning a tragedy into a speculative token. But he says traders know what they’re getting into. It’s essentially a game: how much attention can you capture, how much money can you move before people get bored and move on to the next trend? For him, this meme coin project feels like a mission. Although honestly, the entire meme coin ecosystem is basically a 4chan forum you can trade — chaotic, taboo-free, where anyone can create a token in seconds. Welcome to the wild side of cryptocurrencies.