Marmots Raise Over $120,000 with Crypto Meme Coin After Trump Cuts Funding

The Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory Marmot Project, which has been tracking the lives of wild yellow-bellied marmots in Colorado since 1962, was facing funding cuts from the Trump administration. Led by Daniel Blumstein of UCLA and Julien Martin of the University of Ottawa, the project had to find alternative ways to secure its future.

In a creative move, the team set up an OnlyFans account called 'OnlyMarms', which raised around $6,000 or so over the past few months. However, this amount was not enough to keep the project alive.

It was then that the team received emails from anonymous donors who had created a cryptocurrency token called $OnlyMarms on the Solana blockchain platform Pump.fun. These donors offered the 'creator fees' of the meme coin to the researchers, which are charged each time a transaction is made.

The total amount raised through these creator fees has now surpassed $120,000, secured in a stable currency and directly controlled by the researchers. This unexpected influx of funds should secure the project for at least another year of research.