The 70-fold god collapsed, can the meme DeFi IMF come back?

Written by: Cookies, Rhythm

From early June to early July this year, $IMF has risen nearly 70x as a MemeFi project on the Ethereum mainnet. While $IMF gradually pulled back 50% after hitting an all-time high of $70 million in market capitalization, yesterday a huge drop that peaked at nearly 85% sent shockwaves through the market.

$IMF's drop shocked Zhu Su

What exactly happened to $IMF to see such a huge drop?

What is the IMF?

IMF (International Meme Fund) is a decentralized finance platform tailored for mainnet memes, allowing users to lend stablecoin $USDS with their $PEPE, $JOE, $MOG, and other meme coins as collateral and monetize them without selling. At the same time, through modules such as Accelerate and Amplify, project parties or whales can also add leverage pulls, circular lending and protection, and even create the illusion of "lock-up", which actually realizes early shipments and shadow fund management.

Through the IMF, you can realize the circular lending of meme coins and achieve "left foot on right foot", such as:

· Buy $10,000 PEPE

· Deposit PEPE into the IMF and lend a $5000 USDS loan

· Swap USDS for PEPE

· Deposit the remaining $5000 in PEPE to reduce the loan-to-value ratio (LTV)

At present, the IMF's TVL is still about $166.5 million, with a total of about $54 million in $USDS deposits, about $29.22 million in $PEPE, about $20.58 million in $stETH, about $44.4 million in $MOG, about $5.88 million in $JOE, about $4.94 million in $SPX, and about $7.5 million in $IMF as collateral.

Why did $IMF plummet?

According to the IMF's official tweet, the sudden plunge of $IMF was not due to problems with the protocol itself, but because the $IMF token itself suffered a sell-off, and the more panic selling caused by the sell-off and the series of liquidations led to a sharp drop in $IMF's price.

The official also said in a tweet that due to the speed and frequency of liquidation, some bad debts (about 1% of USDS deposited) have accumulated. This is less than the total yield generated by the lender, so there is no net loss. In addition, issues in the $IMF lending market do not affect other borrowing pairs on the platform.

@2025Spider tweeted that his friend sold $100,000 worth of $IMF for 1.02U, triggering a series of liquidations. He said his friend had no intention of sabotaging the IMF project and said that the project team should close the IMF lending position, otherwise USDS would be at great risk. He also said that the team's oracles are slow to update, and when most IMF/USDT positions are insolvent, oracles still don't update to the latest prices in time.

Regarding the IMF's opening of collateral lending for its own platform currency $IMF, both @2025Spider and the Chinese KOL "Professor Suo said" have raised questions:

Someone asked him under @2025Spider's tweet, "Is the IMF a scam"? @2025Spider said that the team members are good, but they should not open up $IMF collateral lending, otherwise there is reason to think that they want to sell their own tokens in disguise to cash out like the CRV founders. He also said that the amount of loans issued to $IMF exceeds the $IMF UniSwap pool itself, which should not be done from a risk control perspective

"Professor Suo said" is through on-chain records, more directly questioning the IMF team's own collateral to trigger FOMO and then sell tokens to cash out:

The IMF official Twitter released a detailed report on the series of liquidations this afternoon. A total of 260 liquidations involving 126 independent borrowers accounted for 15.47% of the total $IMF supply being liquidated.

epilogue

After the incident, $IMF rebounded nearly 4 times from its lowest point and is still nearly 3 times the price from its lowest point, with its market value rising to nearly $21 million.

However, the controversy that accompanies $IMF may not end. On July 24, @alex_eph612, a major player in the well-known meme coin $APU on Ethereum, fired at the IMF. He said that the IMF was initiated by the cabal of $PEPE, $MOG and Milady, and its business model is actually to ask other organic meme coin communities for free tokens in exchange for short-term buying that the IMF can bring, and then the cabal sells them with the tokens:

The IMF quickly hit back, claiming that no bribes were being solicited and that the criteria for listing lending pairs were public and voted on by $IMF holders:

Ethereum's "meme flywheel" may still have to endure storms.