What is Safemoon? The cryptocoin with a cult-like community

Safemoon was first created in March 2021, but you probably first heard about it in April 2021, when the crypto token rocketed in value by a parabolic amount. If you bought £1 of Safemoon on 9^th March, that would have increased to £233.25 by 21^st April. Meanwhile, a hundred quid investment would’ve reaped £23,325. Even in crypto terms, this value increase across a month and a half is ridiculous. But this all-time high quickly settled down, as the coin slipped off most people’s radars…

Until now. Recently, the Safemoon community has become something of a cult, ever-present across social media. On Twitter, it’s currently the ninth most popular crypto coin, despite being ranked 3020^th in terms of market cap. The @safemoon account has 1.4m followers and, during its first peak, Jake Paul and Lil’ Yachty were among those to have jumped on the bandwagon. The new surge of interest comes as Safemoon announces a load of new features, following a steady rise in value for a token that has naturally pricked people’s ears.

Safemoon protocol is a decentralised finance (DeFi) token, often abbreviated to SFM, which was created on Binance’s blockchain. In its original form, it didn’t really do a lot beyond exist as a ​“deflationary token”. Deflationary is the opposite of inflationary, meaning that the number of coins in circulation decreases over time. This creates demand and, in theory, means its price will go up. Safemoon also has a big ​“selling tax” and part-redistributes to owners. Once upon a time, that was sort of all there was to it, with no real-world functions.

The ​“V2” aspect of it, which you’ll see floating about, is the name Safemoon has been given since upgrading from Safemoon V1 in December 2021. Within this upgrade, the back-end technical was tweaked to allow for ​“big partnerships” and ​“ecosystem plans”, thereby increasing security and altering transaction fees a little.

Other coins have updates, too, but this particular upgrade was so significant that the brains behind it had to alter its smart contracts to an extent where they needed to essentially make a new coin. Ethereum will be doing the same with ETH 2.0, for example.

Besides possibly getting people minted (which is why most people are getting into crypto, let’s be honest) there’s not really much function to this coin. Until V2 entered the game, it sat somewhere between Bitcoin (which is simply a storage of value) and a memecoin like Dogecoin (which is deflationary and generally exists as a moonshot-meme object).

While there’s still little real-world functionality for Safemoon compared to the likes of Ethereum and Solana, it does now have crypto debit cards (like cryp​to​.com) and could therefore be considered a coin that lets you buy things with less hassle than the likes of Bitcoin. But it’s certainly not unique in that aspect.

Hype is a big part of it, but the ​“static rewards” that come from the selling fee we previously mentioned are also pretty appealing. Static rewards are sort of like interest, a reward given to you for doing nothing. Apparently all sorts of new features are coming soon too, including a video game and an NFT marketplace, which might make people see this coin as something that is potentially bringing in more real-word use. These would generally hint at a price increase.

There are blue ticks and a very active community on Twitter (including the hashtag #SafemoonSundays which the company tends to use to drop announcements about the coin (the latest of which was on February 13), and a technical whitepaper detailing what the project does, but that doesn’t mean this isn’t a very, very elaborate scam. With cryptocurrencies, it’s very hard to spot scams – nothing is impossible in that sphere.

The name is a little cliché, for instance. A lot of coins are called safe-something and the moon element refers to ​“moonshot”, a crypto term for getting a huge return on investment. For the same reasons, though, this simply could be a good name to opt for. Another concern is that, while a lot of the coin’s followers are real, many of them are likely bots. A search for ​“safemoon” on Twitter, using the ​“latest filter”, shows dozens of very similar looking tweets every few minutes.

However, the coin has been around for almost a year now. Scammers don’t tend to wait so long to pull the rug, because people can cash out whenever they want to, meaning the scammers risk losing money. Also, if Safemoon was a full rug pull, the scam would (at the time of writing) be worth over half a billion dollars. That’s a very greedy number to accumulate before running off with the goods.

Plus, if people suspect a scam, the rumour tends to run like wildfire. If there was a strong feeling of scepticism about Safemoon among the crypto community, it would likely have already been denounced as a scam on a wide scale.

If you want Safmoon, then you’ll have to do a little bit of admin, seeing as it’s not available via as many exchanges as other crypto coins. The most common place to buy Safemoon at the moment is PancakeSwap, an exchange that generally specialises in more under-the-radar coins, moonshots and gaming tokens. Bitrue, Gate​.io and BitForex are some other exchanges that sell Safemoon at the moment. If you ever need to know where a cryptocoin’s on sale, the best bet is to find it on coinmarketcap, and then click ​“markets”.

So that’s the low-down on Safemoon, the little altcoin with a huge following looking to make itself into a bit more of a real-world player. Is it a scam or is it a (safe)moon shot? Who knows! Crypto is very much still the wild west of the web. One thing is for sure, though: many people are riding this crypto token’s wave.