On February 18, 2025, the name $PAIN is still reverberating in retail investor chat groups, but underneath the heat lies a bit of unease. Since the project announced the refund of 80% of the pre-sale funds on February 6, the meme coin on the Solana chain seems to have pressed the “mute button”, and there has not been any movement for 12 days. investors on X have already exploded: “After raising 185,000 SOL and disappearing, is it running away? Is it going to run out of business?” The community is as anxious as the mosquitoes in summer. The anxiety of the community is like mosquitoes in summer, buzzing, but there is no place to appease. This article explores what happened behind this “pain”.
A painful but happy pre-sale binge
The story of $PAIN begins with “Hide the Pain Harold”. This meme legend, real name András Arató, was originally a retired Hungarian engineer who accidentally took a vacation photo in 2011, and for some reason, his “pain in the smile” emoji went viral and became a global joke about life. On February 2, 2025, Memeland – a crypto team dedicated to Meme culture – brought the IP to the Solana chain and launched $PAIN. 186,000 SOL (approximately $38 million) were raised in 48 hours. As a result, 186,000 SOL (about $38-$40 million) were raised in 48 hours, setting a new record for meme coin pre-sales. It’s almost as if you were selling Harold’s bitter smile emoticons on the street, and suddenly fans from all over the world flocked to your booth, instantly turning it into a black hole of traffic.
However, the story took a sharp turn for the worse. Just after the pre-sale ended, the project announced that they were refunding 80% of the funds, leaving only about $7.6 million to start the project. The official explanation was that this was to ease the burden on the community, but to retail investors, this sounded like a “pack your bags when you’re full” excuse. The refunded SOL was significantly reduced due to market volatility, leaving far more than the average meme coin would need to get off the ground, but the community began to question whether this was really a goodwill gesture, or something else. To make matters worse, the official account has been silent since the refund promise was released, with no notification that the refund has arrived, and users on X have angrily commented, “$PAIN has been silent for 12 days since the end of the pre-sale, which is a ‘pain in the ass! It’s a pain in the ass!”
Can Memeland save the day: Tough enough to back, but the pace is a concern?
Memeland is no small player behind $PAIN. The team recently acquired Hong Kong-listed Memestrategy for $18 million, and is planning to throw out a heavyweight roadmap at its annual strategy meeting on February 20. A KOL on X broke the news: “Memeland may announce $PAIN’s launch plans at the meeting, to save this stagnant water.” Not to mention the fact that $PAIN is also trademarked as Web2, so it’s clear that the ambition is not just to have a flash-in-the-pan meme coin, but to have a meme brand that spans both Web2 and Web3. It’s like putting a suit on Harold and turning him from emoji street performer to cultural IP entrepreneur.
But the key to saving the day is execution: Memeland has the resources, the traffic, and even rumors of a partnership with CoinSecurity (after all, Memeland’s MEME tokens are already live on CoinSecurity), but $PAIN’s 12-day “quiet period” is a real cause for concern. The community speculates that either the project is trying to work out a token distribution plan with the exchange – because the original plan (to pre-sell 20% of the tokens, with more going to NFT holders) is thought to be a smash; or it’s because it sees that the market winds aren’t blowing in the right direction, so it’s simply covering up the project and waiting for the winds to blow before it gets going again. The problem is that meme coins rely on passion and energy, and the longer the delay, the more the enthusiasm of the retail investors will be like leftovers in the refrigerator, slowly cooling down.If Memeland can really throw a big move on the 20th, such as the online timetable or branding, perhaps it can also pull $PAIN back from the edge of the “loss of confidence”.
However, there’s no shortage of successful precedents – like $CULT, which was suspended for half a year, but eventually rose by 5 times. If Memeland can give a clear timetable for the launch or branding plan at its annual meeting on February 20, it may be able to bring the same miracle to $PAIN.
Conclusion
$PAIN is now like Harold’s classic grimace: calm on the surface, but with a lot going on underneath. It could be a dark horse in the meme coin bull market, after all, with the Meme culture and Memeland’s endorsement, it’s not a fantasy to see its market capitalization rise to a billion dollars. But let’s not forget that this “painful” adventure could roll over at any time – 12 days of silence has already made retail investors suspicious, and fake tokens and scam links are flying all over X (officials have warned that the pre-sale is over, so don’t throw any more money at it). My advice? Hold on to your wallets for now and wait for news of Memeland’s annual meeting on February 20th to drop. If it really picks up, the “pain” might turn into “joy”; if it’s still quiet, it might really be “pain without drama”. The crypto world is never short of drama, so how much do you want to bet on $PAIN’s next act?
