Former president Barack Obama’s half-brother Malik Obama has issued an apology over $OBAMA memecoin and said he didn’t realize that those who approached him for launching the memecoin were bad actors. The memecoin’s price crashed within a few hours after it was launched. “Hello folks. Someone paid me a little bit of money to launch $OBAMA, and said it would be great promotion for my book and that I would make a lot of money,” the Kenyan-American businessman who is related to Barack Obama through their father Barack Obama Sr posted to X on Monday. “I didn’t realise they were bad actors. I’m sorry to anyone who lost out.”
“Hey folks, I got a new coin out. Malik Obama coin. So everybody jump in. This is for real, folks. Malik Obama coin,” Malik Obama posted on X as the coin was launched yesterday. “How’s my coin doing folks. Some people asked me to launch a coin. I did it in good faith. How’s it doing?” Malik Obama posted asking about the performance of his coin as it was crashing. And then he issued an apology over the pump and dump scheme that he became a victim of.
Trading volume in the new token was significant, according to crypto exchange data and tracking platform GeckoTerminal, with a total of nearly 72,000 transactions worth around $12.4 million registered in under 24 hours following Malik’s announcement, Newsweek reported.
The token, hosted on the Solana blockchain platform, surged to a peak of $0.006739 after several crypto-focused accounts jumped on the launch, before swiftly sinking to near its current value of $0.00005092.
In his apology on X, Malik Obama said that he was convinced to launch the meme coin to promote his autobiography, Big Bad Brother From Kenya, and that he was consulting “with some of the best people in the space” to rectify the harm caused by the token’s price crash.
