Memecoin WEN drops 43% from peak after $35 million in tokens burned

The launch of memecoin WEN on Solana was one of the biggest crypto stories of the past few days, but the airdrop ended on Monday morning – and hundreds of billions of unclaimed tokens were burned, slashed significant supply of WEN.
WEN holders who received tokens or purchased them from exchanges began to sell off en masse after the claim ended, causing the price to fall sharply over the weekend with significant increases peaking early Monday. .

WEN price chart. Source: TradingView

According to data from CoinGecko, token prices fell 22% in an hour late Monday morning, with the biggest drop occurring in the minutes after project creators burned more than 271 billion tokens — or $35 million worth shouted at that time.
This number is equivalent to more than 27% of the total token supply, accounting for nearly 39% of the total airdrop allocation that has not been claimed before the deadline. WEN's claim airdrop ended at 10 a.m. Monday as planned, which means any tokens not claimed by qualified Solana users will be permanently removed from circulation.
Cutting token supply is often seen as a bullish measure, as the number of tokens in circulation is cut, thus leaving less supply available in the market. In this case, the price has fluctuated wildly in the past few hours between the token burn and WEN whales selling amid the market frenzy.
At its current price of $0.00011, WEN is now down nearly 30% on the day – and the price is virtually unchanged from late Friday, when it launched. WEN is currently down 43% after setting an all-time high price of $0.000187 early Monday morning.
Amid the WEN frenzy and increased Solana DeFi trading volume ahead of Wednesday's Jupiter (JUP) token airdrop, the SOL price today rose 4.2% to a price of over $102.