Strangers on the internet minted a token about fat mountain rodents. It has since raised more than $120,000 and rescued a 64-year science project that federal grants abandoned.

The token is OnlyMarms (ONLYMARMS). It trades on Solana, and its fees flow to a field lab in Colorado. The scientists did not create it. They just claimed the money.

Why a 64-Year Study Ran Out of Money

Kenneth Armitage started counting yellow-bellied marmots in 1962 and ran the project until 2001. UCLA has kept it alive since.

The lab needs $75,000 to $100,000 a year. That pays graduate students and a five-month field season near Crested Butte. Almost none of it is skimmed, because UCLA takes only 6% overhead on gifts.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) funded decades of that work. Then the renewals stopped coming.

The squeeze is national, not personal. NSF had issued 5,684 new grants by Aug. 19, Nature reported this week. That is 46% below its 2021 to 2024 average, and the lowest count in over 40 years.

Under the Trump administration, roughly $1 billion of the NSF’s $8.8 billion budget sits unspent in a holding account.

So UCLA professor Daniel Blumstein put the marmots on OnlyFans in June. The account cleared roughly $6,000. Nowhere near enough.

How OnlyMarms Memecoin Fees Pay for Marmot Science

Fans then minted a token with the same name. On-chain records show the first pool opened on July 25.

Supporters told the scientists to register as the creator. That registration is the whole trick. Pump.fun pays trading fees straight to whoever holds it.

Under its Pump.fun creator fee model, small tokens earn up to 0.95% of every trade. The rate slides toward 0.05% as a coin nears a $20 million valuation.

So every buy and every panic sell paid the lab. Fees hit $88,000 in two weeks, then passed $120,000. The coin was already outraising the OnlyFans account by early August.

Julien Martin, a University of Ottawa professor who co-leads the study, assumed the token was a scam at first.

“I’m completely amazed that this internet culture that I barely know of has raised so much money,” Julien Martin, University of Ottawa, via the Guardian.

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The Hard Part Is Making It Last

The hype has already cooled. ONLYMARMS peaked at $0.0036 on August 4. It is now trading near $0.0014, down about 61%, at a $1.24 million valuation.

Volume is the paycheck here, so volume is the number to watch. The token turned over $503,623 in 24 hours. At the rates above, that is a few hundred to a few thousand dollars a day. Sellers also outnumbered buyers in the main pool.

History is unkind too. Moo Deng, the pygmy hippo coin of 2024, now trades 93% below its peak. Moo Deng’s 2024 crash shows how quickly animal tokens lose their crowd.

Galaxy Research analyst Will Owens put the median Solana meme coin hold time at 100 seconds. A year earlier it was 300. His work on who profits from meme coins argues launchpads and bots take the real cut.

That is the awkward math. A charity funded by churn needs the churn to keep going.

Martin wants a broader token that funds science beyond marmots. He also knows the trick may not work twice.

“It worked for us because we were the first. But it has been nice to see crypto be used for good,” Julien Martin, University of Ottawa, via the Guardian.

A doctoral student costs about $300,000 over four years. The marmots are $180,000 short. Whether strangers keep trading long enough to close that gap is the next test.

Source: BeInCrypto