Wolver Inu (ticker: WOLVERINU) is an Ethereum meme coin that was launched on Oct 23, 2021, combining Marvel’s Wolverine with the branding of the “Inu” dog-coin popularized by Shiba Inu a year earlier. Within two weeks, it was listed on seven exchanges, hit 14,000+ holders and garnered press attention on Yahoo Finance and Nasdaq.
None of that held. It has since shed the lion’s share of its value and its official website now points to an unrelated gambling website, while the fighting game and NFT marketplace that it promised to develop have never materialized. What truly happened is based on the project’s own published tokenomics, on-chain data and the roadmap they announced at launch.
What Is Wolver Inu (WOLVERINU)?
Wolver Inu is a meme coin inspired by Marvel’s Wolverine character, which has been deemed an ERC-20 token on the Ethereum blockchain and features the “Inu” branding of Shiba Inu. It was launched in the midst of the dog-coin craze in October 2021 and gained more than 14,000 holders and multiple exchange listings in a few weeks, before dropping the vast majority of its value and being widely regarded as abandoned.
The strategy was just as easy: take an iconic comic-book title and use it for the meme-coin craze that has made Shiba Inu a multi-billion-dollar token, and the community hype takes over. That formula was valid for a few coins of 2021. Here it doesn’t work like that.
Spelling can differ between trackers and forums, there’s “Wolver Inu”, “Wolverinu” and “WOLVERINU”, but they’re all the same Ethereum token, and it’s important to know that going in, as there are new unrelated tokens that come along to usurp well-known meme coins.
Wolver Inu’s Roadmap and Who Was Behind It?
The project was being promoted by an individual named Ronald who was identified as the Chief Executive Officer and apparently living in London. Initial material referred to a group of approximately 22 individuals, including Solidity developers, graphic designers, and game designers.
At launch, the project released a 4-phase roadmap:
- Phase 1 saw the launch of the tokens, initial DEX listings, and community-building. This happened.
- In phase 2, it included listings on centralized exchanges LBank, Hotbit, and BitMart and an audit from CertiK, which was promised. The listings were placed; the audit was declared to be in progress, and the completion of the audit could never be verified independently through public channels.
- Phase 3 was supposed to be a play-to-earn fighting game named X-INU and give exclusive NFTs and a secondary reward token called Adamantium, and was slated to launch in 2022. Never launched.
- Phase 4 was to feature bigger exchanges, a branded exchange, a comics series, and merchandise. Never launched.
The token’s listings were available on Uniswap, ShibaSwap, SushiSwap, FegEx, Hotbit, LBank and BitMart within two weeks of its launch, while the press releases were disseminated via Newsfile Corp to Yahoo Finance, Nasdaq and Digital Journal. It’s a normal paid wire distribution, which is good to note since it looks like media coverage, but it’s not an endorsement from any of the outlets.
In the meantime, the project was silent until Phase 3 was due. The X-INU game, the Adamantium rewards, and the NFT drop have yet to be sent, and no public statement has been released regarding the reason.
How the Wolver Inu Tax and Reflections System Actually Works
The number of tokens in circulation is capped at tens of quadrillions, a very large number that is more of a pricing trick to keep the price per token low, and to that end, a tax-and-reflections model typical of the meme coins of 2021 was added.
Each purchase and sale is divided into 10%, and distributed as 1% distributed as reflections growth of token balance just by holding), 4% for a buyback wallet which is used to periodically burn tokens, and 5% for a marketing wallet. Round-trip trade: buying and then selling a position costs about 20% in taxes alone, prior to slippage. Slippage is in addition on this thin token.
There’s a second twist. As can be seen in CoinGecko’s listing, the project has moved from its initial contract to a new one, and also highlights that the current contract contains a variable tax function, allowing the deployer to alter the tax rate once deployed. Per se, it’s not an indication of some malicious activity, but it’s something to know when you’re dealing with it: the rules that a smart contract’s rules live in code the deployer can alter.
What Happened to the Wolver Inu Price (and Why the Numbers Won’t Match)
All the big trackers say it’s going down. Wolver Inu’s price has dropped by over 85% from its all-time high and according to some sources, it may be more than 90% down. At CoinMarketCap, the circulating supply is effectively zero, as is the market cap and fully diluted valuation at CoinGecko.
What is more significant than the percentage is that the trackers are not necessarily consistent with one another on details. Look up Wolver Inu’s price across three price sites and you’ll probably find three different prices, and sometimes the “last updated” dates are months apart! That is not a data error, it is a direct reflection of the very low volume that the token trades. When the real volume disappears, so do the price feeds, since there is nothing to refresh them.
The only venue that is still active is the Uniswap V2 WOLVERINU/WETH pair. The daily volumes have ranged from just a few dollars to several hundred dollars, and even a small order has the potential to cause the price to change dramatically, while a small order to sell may not even have a buyer.
Wolver Inu Dead, Abandoned or a Scam? Here’s How to Tell
Online, the terms “Dead”, “abandoned” and “scam” are used interchangeably, but they mean different things and it’s important to know the difference if you’re trying to determine what happened to a token that you have in your possession.
Researchers at the Technical University of Denmark and Sapienza University of Rome conducted a cross-chain study on almost 35,000 meme coins, with the findings that quick abandonments are the norm, rather than the exception, for tokens that undergo a hype cycle. The researchers monitored it alongside “legitimacy” signals, such as whether a project’s logo, social links, and website were still live and maintained or not.
The same applies to Wolver Inu:
- The only active pair trades on a daily basis between single dollars and several hundred dollars, which is far from trading volume that would enable the token to be a tradable asset of any meaningful size.
- The initial website wolverinu.com is now redirecting to an unconnected gambling site and does not contain anything related to the project anymore.
- In fact, there are two out of the four roadmap phases that have not yet shipped, and those two phases are the X-INU game and the larger exchange/merchandise phase – which are over four years post-launch.
- CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap have both indicated that this project has zero circulating supply and market capitalization.
None of that constitutes a rug pull per se, and no one has been found pulling this liquidity or weaponizing that variable tax function to catch sellers off-guard. What the evidence shows is something much more mundane, and less exciting: a hype-fueled launch that found early legs, but failed to follow through and was left to languish in the wake of the 2022 bear market. This is a failure mode as opposed to actual fraud, but it’s not a positive failure mode from a token-holder’s perspective.
How Wolver Inu Compares to Shiba Inu and the Rest of the 2021 “Inu” Wave
Wolver Inu entered a true dog pile. Shiba Inu had already proved that it was possible for a joke that became a dog-coin (called an “Inu”) to become a multi-billion market cap, and this was followed by a slew of dog-coin cousins throughout 2021, all hoping for a familiar brand name and enough community enthusiasm to make it happen. Sentiment within the category was fairly high, as fear and greed readings tend to go and Wolver Inu’s rapid listing schedule and 14k holders in a month were as much a result of that as it was a result of the project.
The ones that did survive had one thing in common: they didn’t stop after the initial hype died down, as Wolver Inu did. Shiba Inu has branched out into an exchange and layer-2 network of its own. Floki put money into actual marketing systems and utility products. Even the smaller survivors in the smaller category still have social accounts that are active and a functioning website years later.
However, when those projects began to stand out as utilities, Wolver Inu’s roadmap ground to a halt. A recognizable name and an initial listing spree can get a meme coin to 14,000 holders. On their own, they can’t keep them there.
If You’re Holding Wolver Inu or Thinking About Buying It
If you are wondering what to do with this token, there are a few things more important than the price chart.
Double-check the contract before putting your hands on it. Since Wolver Inu has migrated contracts at least once, there is a possibility that older promotional materials refer to an outdated address and copycat tokens are common in the industry. You can verify the current, migrated contract directly on Etherscan, instead of relying on what an address was posted in a previous post, and you can verify an address using a wallet contract scanner in a few seconds before you connect a wallet or approve a swap. A blockchain explorer displays the same raw data that the blockchain trackers compare to get holder counts, the size of liquidity pools, and the number of recent transactions, among other things.
Charge for the round trip, not just admission. The 10% transaction tax plus the slippage due to near-zero liquidity could easily result in a 20-30% loss on both the buy and sell, with no price action as a result.
Note that the price feed may not be in real-time. As mentioned at the top, stale or conflicting prices on trackers are not a glitch to simply scroll through, it’s an indicator of liquidity.
If you choose to still trade this less-than-liquid asset, a platform that offers stop-loss protection on meme coins will reduce the amount that a bad fill can cost you, and a hardware wallet will keep it off of exchanges and browser wallets, where most crypto theft occurs.
Also, keep in mind there is no safety net in the regulations. Sentiment-based coins such as this one are often thinly traded, with limited wallets holding a majority of the tokens, and are susceptible to pump-and-dump schemes, the New York State Department of Financial Services said. In addition, SEC staff have said that “typical meme coins” do not constitute securities, meaning that the investor protections that usually would exist with a typical stock are not applicable here.
Wolver Inu Teaches About Meme Coins: The Real Lesson
Wolver Inu isn’t an atypical tale in crypto; it’s nearer to the median story. The meme coin study results are consistent: the tokens that are thrown into a hot market tend to be abandoned quickly after a hype spike, and not an exceptional result.
The bottom line isn’t “don’t invest in meme coins ever. It’s that the diligence is about five minutes, and it’s the same five minutes each time: check if the site or social media is still active, look at the actual trading volume, rather than just the price, understand what the smart contract actually gives the deployer the rights to do, and confirm the contract address for yourself instead of an old link. Perform those checks before purchasing and after it is already looking like Wolver Inu’s chart.
