Investors upset at Pike Finance’s token launch over liquidity shortfall 

Early investors in Pike Finance complained about Monday's token generation event, as the team provided only $10,000 in initial liquidity on the Aerodrome decentralized exchange on Base. 

Due to the limited liquidity at launch, the token’s price quickly dropped to around $0.0035 — a decrease of approximately 90%, according to DEXScreener data.

Pike Finance raised just under $6.5 million in its March 2024 token presale, with participants buying tokens at prices ranging from $0.0280 to $0.0374. Several investors were upset at how the token could launch with such a small allocation of initial liquidity when the project had raised so much money.

Amid the price slide, early investors raised complaints against the project, and some even called for blockchain sleuth ZachXBT to investigate the situation.

“I put $1500 into the @PikeFinance pre-sale. It's currently worth $61. The pool was seeded with $10k and instadumped in the first 30 mins,” wrote one user on X going by Picolas Cage.

Just after the token generation event, Pike Finance posted a thread on X detailing that the event had taken place and that the token had been deployed on the Base network. The Pike team further wrote that they are "implementing a new playbook for the Pike token launch."

In another post on X, a screenshot showed what appeared to be one of the Pike Finance founders, Terryljm, attempting to calm down investors in a Discord channel for presale participants. 

In it, Terryljm said that the team is planning to acquire Pike tokens on the open market and “use the remaining circulating collateral from the restitution supply” to bolster liquidity. Terryljm said it would be a “progressive effort” carried out over months.

Nuts Finance, the team behind Pike Finance, developed several other crypto projects, including ACoconut, Tapio Finance, and Taiga Protocol. ACoconut launched in 2021 and saw a similar dramatic decline, with the price never recovering and the project’s website now offline.

The token launch is the latest issue that Pike Finance has faced since its inception. Following its presale, the project was hit by two hacks targeting vulnerabilities in its smart contracts. The attackers stole $300,000 in one incident and roughly $1.6 million in another, resulting in a total loss of about $1.9 million, according to security firm Halborn.

The Block reached out to Pike Finance for comment but has yet to receive a response as of the time of publication.