Up First from NPR - Gambling with Memes

Episode Date: March 30, 2025

What do Moo Deng the pygmy hippo, social media sensation Hawk Tuah, and the President of the United States all have in common? They've all inspired highly valuable, highly volatile memecoins. The memecoin began as a sort of joke cryptocurrency, but it soon became very real.On today's episode of The Sunday Story, we turn to our friends at NPR's Planet Money to help us understand the phenomenon of memecoins. What are they, and how did they go from a one-off joke to a speculative frenzy worth tens of billions of dollars? Who are the winners and losers in this brazen new market?Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

I'm Ayesha Roscoe and you're listening to the Sunday Story from Up First. So there are some things in this world that I just have a hard time getting my head around. And you know, I've got to say, one of them is cryptocurrency. And the longer it's around, the weirder and more complicated it seems to get. It's all a bit daunting to me, but for some of my colleagues, explaining new trends in the economy is what they do. A few months ago, Planet Money host Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi came across a viral video that clarified something about the explosion of a type of cryptocurrency called mean coins.

These are highly valuable and highly volatile tradeable currencies that have cropped up on the internet over the past decade, and anyone can make one. Here's Alexi talking about the video he saw and the story of one particular meme coin. On the night of November 19, 2024, this baby-faced kid, he looks around 13 years old, used a new online platform to launch a brand new cryptocurrency into the world. We're not using his name because he did all this anonymously. The cryptocurrency he created is what's known as a meme coin, which is a kind of joke currency, something that doesn't hold any inherent value besides what other people on the internet

are willing to pay for it. The kid named his coin Gen Z Quant. He spent a few hundred dollars to buy up about 5% of the total supply of his new coin. And then he also started live streaming on the platform. Somebody else recorded the live stream, which is why in the video you can hear the kid and a couple other voices. Are we bonded yet or what's good? In the video, you can both see the kid's face and a chart showing

the coins price. Within seconds the list of people buying the coin starts to stream in and the little green price line on the chart starts shooting upward like a rocket ship trying to reach escape velocity on its way to the moon. At first the kid seems surprised. Wait what what? He said, wait, what? Wait, I'm so confused. But then he gets this kind of devious grin on his face. His cheeks start to get a little flushed. He moves his cursor over to a sell button on the website. And with one click, he cashes out the entirety of his holdings in Gen Z Quan.

Some 51 million tokens for a cool $20,000 or so. Oh, the or so. There's a murmur of surprise from other people watching the livestream. In the chat, a little burst of fire emojis starts popping off. The price of Gen Z quant then immediately collapses. The green line on the price chart turns red and takes a nosedive. And for a moment the kid again seems shocked at what he's been able to do. And then the kid makes it clear. He is not in fact so confused. He seems to know exactly what's happening. He extends both of his middle fingers to the camera and utters a

line that's become kind of infamous in the crypto world. Thanks for the 20 bandos. Thanks for the 20 bandos. Thanks in other words for the $20,000 or so that this group of total strangers on the internet had just transferred right into his account. The kid then stands up, starts tugging at his hair, and just takes a moment to revel in what he's pulled off. Yo yo yo yo yo what the f***? And I think maybe the most absurd part of all this is that the kid then goes on to pull

this exact same move two more times with two other meme coins he created that very same evening, betting over $50,000 in total. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no night. All from the comfort of his own home, and all before bedtime. If someone pulled this move on a market like the New York Stock Exchange, they might've had government regulators knocking on the door.

But meme coins are kind of a wild west. And the thing is, what this one kid did is just a tiny glimpse into this much bigger economic story. Just one example of a transformation rippling across the internet. There are thousands of these meme coins being launched every single day now, involving everyone from literal children to social media sensations like Hoctua or Mudang the Pygmy Hippo to the President of the United States. It's the kind of thing that makes you wonder

How in the world did we get here? Today on the Sunday story Planet Money hosts Alexi Horowitz Gazi and Freelance reporter Nick Nevis explained just how we got here stay with us This message comes from wise the app for doing things in other currencies. Sending or spending money abroad, hidden fees may be taking a cut. With Wyze, you can convert between up to 40 currencies at the mid-market exchange rate. Visit Wyze.com. TNCs apply. This message comes from Mint Mobile. If you're tired of spending hundreds on big wireless bills, bogus fees, and free perks, Mint Mobile might be right for you with plans starting from $15 a month. Shop plans today at mintmobile.com slash switch.

Upfront payment of $45 for 3-month 5GB plan required. New customer offer for first 3 months only. Then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details. This message comes from Mint Mobile. We're back with a Sunday story. Today a deep dive into meme coins from our colleagues over at Planet Money. Here's NPR's Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi with freelance reporter Nick Nevis. Hello Alexi. Hello.

Yes. Over the past few months you and I have been on a deep dive into the world of meme coins. We've been spelunking in the crypto mines. We've been getting lost in them because over the world of meme coins. We've been spelunking in the crypto mines. We've been getting lost in them because over the past decade, meme coins have gone from a one-off joke to a speculative frenzy worth tens of billions of dollars. Today on the show, the story of the meme coin casino,

how a few technological leaps and cultural shifts helped turn a seedy internet backwater into a giant cryptocurrency gold rush. Okay, so in order to tell the story of how we got to this moment, where we are constantly awash in new meme coins, we have to begin at the beginning. And in the beginning, of course, there was Bitcoin. CB. Bitcoin was launched in 2009, and it was pitched as a sort of utopian alternative to government-backed currencies. It was a way for people to pay each other without having

to rely on the existing financial system. AC. But in the years after its launch, there was also this whole wave of often sketchy new Bitcoin copycats. And this is where you start to see this pattern develop that's characterized the world of cryptocurrency ever since. A cycle of grand utopian promises, followed by a period of frenzied speculation and outright fraud. And this was the seedy state of crypto that inspired what is widely considered to be the

first meme coin, Dogecoin. The story starts back in 2013 with a guy named Jackson Palmer. Palmer was an Australian product manager at a tech company, and he believed that there was something fundamentally useful about what crypto promised to do. But when he looked around at some of these speculative new cryptocurrencies, he saw that people seemed to be using crypto as a kind of cash grab. Basically, some people were running what are known as pump and dump schemes. Here's how it would work. Some programmers would create a new coin.

They'd hype it up as the next Bitcoin, maybe do some sketchy stuff to fake demand, and get people to buy in, all to pump up the price. And when enough money had flowed in, they would sell off all their coins. They would dump their holdings. The price would collapse, leaving everyone who'd bought in holding the bag. As Palmer looked around, he thought crypto was turning into kind of a joke. So why not turn it into an actual joke? He described how he came up with the idea in an interview with our daily podcast, The Indicator, back in 2018. I'd come home for the day and an Australian kind of tradition, you know, cracked open

a beer and I was just sitting around and the way it kind of came together was that I had one browser tab open with this article about Doge and right next to it I had CoinMarketCap, which is a very popular website for checking the valuations of cryptocurrencies. So my tab names kind of almost spelt it out for me in a way. I just thought Dogecoin, that's hilarious. Doge, you may remember, was this super popular internet meme built around the image of a dog, a quizzical looking Shiba Inu. And it was paired with these kind of grammatically challenged captions, like such wow and much amaze.

Palmer and a friend coded up a new coin and in doing so, they married the world of memes with the world of crypto. For Palmer, Dogecoin was an attempt at convincing the crypto curious to make more rational investment decisions. But instead, the good people of the internet decided to pull a giant irreverent yes and

to Palmer's joke coin. They started buying more and more of them. Palmer was surprised and at first he went along for the ride. He and a community of fellow crypto jokesters donated their increasingly valuable doge coins to charity. And for a while things were going well, but... Whenever you have something that's going really successful, you have a successful community like that,

and there's a monetary element to it, it's like blood in the water, right? Sharks can smell it from miles away. And pretty quickly, fraudsters started to use Dogecoin in the kind of pump and dumps it was meant to critique, which was exactly the opposite of what Palmer had intended. Yeah, tell me about it, right? The irony is definitely not lost on me. I feel guilty enough for creating Dogecoin, which I'm sure that people have... I know that people have lost money on in the past and that pains me. In the years that followed its creation, Dogecoin ended up spawning dozens of copycat cryptocurrencies

or copydoge's, I guess, in this case. But the number of these new meme coins was still limited by the technical expertise someone needed to make one. You needed to be able to essentially copy and tweak Bitcoin's underlying code. And to understand how that barrier to entry started to change, we called up Zeke Fox. Zeke is an investigative journalist at Bloomberg and author of the book Number Go Up, Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall. What do you do when you're not digging into the smarmy back corners of the crypto world? I've got three little kids, so I like to hang out with them. And I hope they never get into meme coins.

Yes, keep them quarantined. Zeke says that first revolution that helped spawn our meme coin-filled moment was a cultural one, the one where Dogecoin helped marry the world of memes to the world of crypto. But the second revolution was a technological leap. It came a few years later with the invention of a brand new blockchain called Ethereum. So a blockchain is basically a ledger that everyone can see. And it keeps track of how many tokens someone has of a given cryptocurrency. It used to be that in order to make a new cryptocurrency you had to code up a new blockchain So Bitcoin had its own blockchain Dogecoin had a different one But Ethereum made it so that you could keep track of multiple cryptocurrencies on the same blockchain

You could just create a new coin right on top of Ethereum's underlying infrastructure. And this new Ethereum blockchain helped set off a massive surge in new cryptocurrencies starting around 2017 or so. They were called initial coin offerings or ICOs. And these coins were often framed as useful new technologies, cryptocurrencies that would have some sort of real world utility. This was the time when people were still really pitching blockchain as like the solution to all the world's problems. So in general, these ICOs were like,

it's the blockchain for dentists, or this is gonna be the blockchain that helps track agriculture. It's Bitcoin for farmers. Yeah. But people are basically trading them just on hype. And studies afterwards found that something like three quarters of all the ICOs initial coin offerings were scams or fraud.

You can see that same quintessential pattern playing out again here. An era of utopian promises turning into a whirlwind of fraudful deceit. Yet, Zeke says, this round of crypto speculation was also limited in its impact because the majority of investors just did not understand the basics of transacting on the blockchain, like how to set up your own crypto wallet or trade coins.

But then came the third revolution that helps explain how we got to our current meme coin moment. And this one had both a cultural element and a technological one. The cultural part happened around the time of the COVID-19 lockdowns, when a bunch of bored day traders stuck at home started banding together to buy meme stocks. Companies like AMC and GameStop.

This was the marriage of meme culture and the entire stock market. The technological part was the rise of mainstream crypto exchanges, like FTX and Coinbase. These platforms made it easier for retail investors to buy and sell cryptocurrencies, and that helped swell the market to new heights. During that huge crypto bubble of like, 2021, 22, there certainly was some meme coin trading,

but it was not the focus of cryptocurrency traders. The rise of the meme coin was still to come. Most crypto bros were still focused on mainstream cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ether, and the most radical speculators were obsessing over things like non-fungible tokens or NFTs, like those weirdly expensive board ape cartoons people were buying. Apes together strong.

Planet of the speculative ape investments. Exactly. But as we have learned in the cyclical history of crypto, number that go up must eventually come down. Which is exactly what happened in November of 2022. That's when it was revealed that the founder of crypto exchange FTX, Sam Bankman Fried, had been secretly using billions of dollars of customer funds to make massive risky bets. In winter 2022, FTX collapses and that's like the nadir of the crypto market. Crypto winter, some might call it. Yeah. That's like the nadir of the crypto market. Crypto winter, some might call it.

Yeah. So how do we go from crypto's dark night of the soul to an era teeming with more meme coins than we can keep track of? And who are the winners and losers of this brazen new world? That's coming up after the break. Follow and listen wherever you get your podcasts. This message comes from Mint Mobile. Mint Mobile took what's wrong with wireless and made it right. They offer premium wireless plans for less,

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Upfront payment of $45 for three-month 5GB plan required. New customer offer for first three months only. Then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details. Okay, so at this point we've seen the same pattern play out over and over in the world of crypto. There's a rush of utopian promises, followed by a speculative rush of shady investments, followed by a sobering collapse as all the sketchy stuff is revealed. Dogecoin, you'll remember, was first invented as a cheeky response to the wave of sketchy Bitcoin copycats. And you can think of the current memecoin moment as a sort of like

doubling down on the joke. When crypto exchange FTX collapsed, bringing down the whole crypto market along with it, it was like the ultimate emperor's new clothes moment. Even Sam Bakeman Fried, the person who seemed to be the face of crypto going legit, turned out to be a committed fraud to the tune of billions of dollars. In light of that, some crypto traders stopped believing in any promise of the technology's underlying value. They started to see it as pure irreverent speculation. And early last year, that sort of nihilistic feeling fused with yet another technological leap forward. Zeke Fox says this time in the form of a new website.

The latest meme coin craze was really enabled by this new trading platform called Pump.Fun that made creating a meme coin a point and click experience. And more than 5 million coins have been created in like the year that it's existed. Pump.Fun is a bit chatty, but as far as we can tell, it was created in January of 2024 by three entrepreneurs in their early 20s in London. We'd reached out to Pump.Fun,

but they didn't get back to us. And the idea behind the platform was basically to demolish the barrier to entry for people making new meme coins. To create a place where people could launch and then promote their own coins as a sort of social media experience. Let's go to Pump.Fun. Will you give us a little safari? Yes, definitely. Zeke took us on a little tour of the Pump.Fun website. It looks a bit like a throwback to

the flash websites of the 90s. All bright neon text and jpegs of memes. I know it's like seems like something that only a child could enjoy. Maybe a man-child. I think there's a lot of kids on there. Some who've made a lot of money. Pump.Fun has made it so incredibly easy to make new meme coins that the homepage is just constantly updating with images of coins that the homepage is just constantly updating with images of coins that have just been born coin after coin after coin. I'm looking at their most recent coins and you know there's what if we all hold 27 seconds ago Doge night 46 seconds ago leader of hats one hour ago.

What's the kind of meme coin leader board today? Like some of these ones just sort of become like classics and they keep trading like Dogecoin is still top dog. I'm sorry. I'm top doge. That was completely inevitable. I Shiba Inu, which is like a Dogecoin ripoff is very high up there. Pepe dog with hat has proven to have some staying power. But I think fart coin is the hottest meme coin right now.

Fart coins going to the moon. Yeah. I mean, fart coin to me, it's like, how is this even funny? And so I was, I was asking my favorite meme coin trader source about this. I was like, do you think it's funny? And he said, sometimes the fact that they're not funny is what's funny. It's like horseshoe meme theory. Yeah. Pumped out fun is a place where the newest juvenile inside jokes of the internet can

be transformed almost instantaneously into tradable financial instruments. And so you can see the stream of new coins on the site as the cutting edge of what wannabe meme coin millionaires think might go viral. Irreverent internet culture meets the market? Could anything possibly be more Planet Money than that? Should we make a coin and find out? Let's go right to the edge of making a coin

and then hover on the edge. What do you think? Should it be a cute animal? Yeah, I mean, our mascot is the squirrel from the t-shirt project. Oh, where can I get the squirrel? Do you want to, I brought a picture of my cat, but we can use the squirrel. Yeah, just type into Google,

type in Planet Money squirrel. Is this, it's got a martini? It's a squirrel with a martini glass. Well, this seems like it has a lot of meme coin potential Definitely. So what should we call it? Well, there's either Animal spirits or there's PM squirrel coin PM squirrel coin. Okay, so the ticker will be PM SC naturally for the description This is the planet money squirrel. So it's not good. Oh god. We're playing with fire This is the Planet Money Squirrel. Does that sound good?

Oh god, we're playing with fire. We could launch a coin that just gets out of our hands. Just so you know, you can never take it back. We did not, in fact, launch the Planet Money Squirrel coin. Not today, Satan. But it was a shockingly easy prospect. By filling out a few description details and uploading a copy and pasted image from the internet, you too can be the proud slash terrified parent of a new meme coin.

But raising that coin to a monstrously profitable adulthood is not so easy. Because you can think of Pumped Up Fun as this hyper literal attention economy. If a coin creator can't generate enough excitement around their meme coin, they won't be able to ensnare enough buyers to get it to take off. It's very easy to create the coin, but what's hard is attracting attention for it. Now there are three basic ways people garner attention in this world, and it comes down to how much clout the person might have. For the first group, for the people who are cloutless in crypto land, Pumped.Fun

offered a solution. It had a livestream feature. So a no-name new coin creator could try to build a following by basically carnival-barking the merits of their meme coin in real time. So Pumped.Fun had like a built-in feature where the creators of the tokens could live stream themselves to promote their coins. And this went downhill fast. People were doing like really gross things to try to get attention. There was someone claiming that they had kidnapped the developer of the coin and would torture them. Oh God. Somebody killed a chicken.

Dark. Somebody held a gun to a fish. A kid had his mom flash the live stream. When that was a little sillier, this kid created a coin. He was live streaming. While he was streaming, he took the money and then gave the camera double middle fingers and said, thanks for the 20 bandos in a high-pitched voice. That of course is the precocious and a little devious 13-year-old from the beginning of our story.

Thanks for the 20 bandos. Pumped Out Fun eventually took down the livestream function from its website in response to all of this mayhem. Sort of a classic case of, this is why we can't have nice things. So that's the first group. People without much clout who have to find some way to grab attention for their meme coin. Now, there's a second group of meme coin creators and their big strategy is to already be famous. And we've mostly seen kind of like C-listers do this. Iggy Azalea launched a coin on Pumped Up Fun

and that one for a long time I was seeing people, I guess maybe mostly Iggy Azalea herself tweeting about her mother coin. Caitlyn Jenner had one. There was the ill-fated Hawktooa coin, which crashed just hours after it launched, and perhaps the most famous or infamous of all the new meme coins was the one launched by President Donald J. Trump. But the third and final group of meme coin creators are the real power players.

These are the shadowy groups of well-resourced insiders who know how to play the game. Because there's this whole ecosystem of crypto influencers on places like Discord, Axe, TikTok, YouTube. And if these influencers start talking about a coin. Their followers will start to buy because these people have a track record of talking about coins kind of early on and the coins going on to attract even more attention. This meme is so fire, it's going to burn the internet down. Guys, I think this meme coin could pull some crazy numbers. And now today this coin is already about to hit 800k market cap and break through a mill.

And in crypto, these influential people are called KOLs, which stands for Key Opinion Leader. And those people are often paid to promote the coins. And some people will tell their followers, I'm getting paid to promote this coin. And other people will not. Zeke says there is one key leader whose opinion seems to be valued above all others in the world of meme coins.

A man who has taken the joke so far as to helm a controversial new government entity named after that original Doge meme. What is really ideal is if Elon Musk will talk about whatever the coin is about. Like one of the big reasons Dogecoin is still the most valuable meme coin is because Elon Musk started tweeting about it in 2019.

But it's not just Dogecoin. A lot of the most successful coins have had some connection to Elon Musk. Elon Musk is like the meme coin market mover in chief. Yes, because the people who are trading these are watching patterns and they're saying, hey, last time Elon Musk talked about something the coin went up, so maybe it'll happen this time. And then that kind of becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Now, regardless of which kind of meme coin creator we're talking about, the goal on Pump.Fun is generally the same. Whether you are a 13 year old boy or a C-list celebrity or a crypto insider, what you want is for your memecoin to blast off. You can think of the site as a kind of massive launch pad, like a giant Cape Canaveral, but a lot of it is filled with the skeletal remains of memecoins that have failed to launch. Something like 99% of coins are dead on arrival. Which means they basically have zero buyers.

Right. Like I bet you a lot of them never sell a single token. But if a coin creator can get enough key opinion leaders on board, they might get some initial price lift off. Because this whole horde of key opinion followers might hop on the rocket in the hopes that they can hop off before the price collapses. And if they can get enough price lift off, their coins will graduate from Pumped Out Fund to bigger platforms with whole new groups of potential buyers, like one platform aptly

named Moonshot, to the biggest exchanges like Binance and Coinbase. The hope for the truest meme coin believers is that their coin will somehow manage to breach escape velocity and make it all the way to the financial moon, maybe even Mars, to join the doges and Pepecoins of yore. But regardless of whether a coin dies on the launchpad or makes it to the moon, there's one group that makes money no matter what, because Pumped.Fun gets a 1 percent cut of every trade made on the platform. Right. In Pump.Fun, this platform, in just a year or so,

Dune Analytics, which is a blockchain analysis company, says that it's made $400 million in fees. So just like as in a casino, on Pump.Fun, the house also always wins? Yeah. But if you are somehow coming away from all of this with the impression that meme coin millionaires are being minted all the time, Zeke says that is exactly the fear of missing out that fuels this whole market.

What everyone wants is that next one that's going to go up 10x, 100x, 1000x. And they're the stories of people who really have made a million bucks because they bought dog whip hat early. And when somebody hears that, it's pretty powerful, creates this sense of FOMO. But Dune Analytics studied blockchain data and found that only 3% of traders on Pumped Up Fun ever made $1,000. And keep in mind, meme coin trading is a zero-sum game. Every dollar someone makes on a meme coin mathematically has to come at the expense of someone else buying it.

Which means that this tiny minority of winners, that 3% of traders, is making their fortunes off the vast majority of meme coin investors. Which raises the enormous question, why do so many people continue to invest in a system that feels so clearly rigged against them? Why do people still invest in meme coins? In your mind, is this all just a giant casino? Like, is this just like an ancient practice of sometimes irrational gambling, like just updated and put onto the blockchain? I mean, I definitely would say this is just gambling. Everyone involved would agree with

that, I think, but it's a really weird form of gambling. And oftentimes, by the time that you or I hear about any coin, you know, the insiders have probably accumulated a big supply at a low price and they're just waiting for losers like us to hear about it and buy some so that they can sell theirs and get real money. In a way, a lot of what's going on here feels like a new twist on the classic pump and dump scheme. But instead of people promising financial gains based on some underlying value, these days, many meme coin boosters are just promising that there will be enough other chumps out there to cash you out when the time comes. Call it a chump and dump.

Now, I think that most of the people who buy this, like they're not being fooled by the coins. They just think that, hey, I am not the last person who's going to buy this coin. Someone else will come along later and buy this coin for more. Has anyone made a greater fool coin? I guarantee that they have. And in fact, when we checked the Pump.Fun registry, there turned out to be no less than 12 competing greater fool meme coins, half of them with the ticker sign fool. Justine Yan produced this episode of The Sunday Story.

The original Planet Money episode was produced by Willa Rubin and edited by Jess Jang with help from Keith Romer, fact checking by Sierra Juarez, and engineering by Neil Rauch. The Sunday Story team also includes Andrew Mambo, Jennifer Schmidt, and Leona Simstrom. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. I'm Ayesha Roscoe. Up first we'll be back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week. Until then, have a great rest of your weekend. This message comes from Mint Mobile. If you're tired of spending hundreds on big wireless bills, bogus fees, and free perks,

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