Meme Coin Creator Said He Had No Hands, So He Couldn’t Rug—He Lied

A man claiming to have no hands started a live Twitch stream encouraging crypto users to invest in his Solana meme coin last weekend—because without hands, so he claimed, he was incapable of rug pulling the project and bailing with the proceeds.

“I don’t have hands, I cannot rug you guys, chill,” the dev’s Twitch channel, NoHandsNoRug, proclaimed heavy-handedly.

Can you guess what happened just three minutes into the stream?

According to several attendees of the livestream, which occurred on Sunday, the coin, HANDS, began accumulating liquidity. That is, until the coin’s apparent creator, standing in a bedroom with a sign tucked under his chin, revealed himself to actually have arms tucked behind his back—before sprinting to his computer and immediately using his newfound hands and fingers to pull liquidity from the project.

The exploit, which took about three seconds to execute, immediately drained all liquidity from the token, leaving holders—sorry—empty-handed.

It’s not the first time that a nefarious crypto user has taken advantage of live streams to whip up excitement for a new meme coin. Last week, a mom performed sexually suggestive acts on her purported son’s live stream to pump his meme coin, LIVEMOM, before the duo appeared to rug the token.

This week’s less graphic sleight-of-hand may not have caught all onlookers by surprise. Just before the livestream started, one crypto user posed the exceedingly fair question: “How was token deployed then?”

“Dick,” another user replied.

In total, the NoHands dev made away with about 7 SOL, worth barely more than $1,000 at the time.

But in crypto, one degen’s trash can always become another’s treasure. After a clip of the dastardly dev’s hand reveal began circulating on Twitter (aka X), it quickly attracted attention.

Within a day, a group of four anonymous friends told Decrypt that they initiated a community takeover of HANDS, confident it had achieved enough notoriety as a meme to potentially become a meme coin with real staying power. They say they don’t hold a substantial amount of the token, but have focused their efforts on expanding NoHandsNoRug’s social media presence.

On Monday, they started a Twitter account and Telegram account for the token; other community members are already building a website. Since Monday, the token has seen some $552,000 in trading volume; today it fell to a market capitalization around $16,000.

HANDS’ purported new leadership say they are taking steps to prevent the token from being rugged by burning its liquidity. According to DexsSreener, however, an anonymous crypto trader currently holds about a third of the entire token supply. To be clear, meme coins like HANDS can easily be rug pulled by large holders, assuming they can find liquidity to trade.

Wusi, an pseudonymous crypto user who bought HANDS during the dev’s initial livestream, told Decrypt they lost 1 SOL when the token was rugged.

They have since reinvested 2 SOL back into the project.

Edited by Andrew Hayward