SafeMoon: 'SafeMoon Is Safe' - It Wasn't

The 'community token' whose founders were secretly draining the liquidity pool.

SafeMoon logo

SafeMoon launched in March 2021 with a simple pitch: hold the token and get rewarded. Every transaction had a 10% tax. Half was redistributed to existing holders. Half went to a liquidity pool. The more people traded, the more you earned. Diamond hands were built into the tokenomics.

The marketing was relentless. TikTok influencers shilled it. Reddit communities pumped it. The slogan "SafeMoon to the Moon" was everywhere. By May 2021, the token had a market cap of $5.7 billion and millions of holders. It felt like a movement.

Behind the scenes, the founder Braden John Karony and other executives were siphoning millions from the liquidity pool. The "locked" liquidity that was supposed to back the token was being quietly drained to fund personal purchases including luxury homes and cars.

The token price eventually collapsed over 99% from its peak. Holders who believed in the community and the tokenomics watched their investments evaporate. The 10% transaction tax that was supposed to reward holding made it expensive to sell, trapping people in a falling asset.

In November 2023, the SEC charged SafeMoon and Karony with securities fraud. The DOJ filed criminal charges. Karony was convicted in May 2025 and sentenced to 100 months on February 10, 2026. The judge called it "massive fraud." Thomas Smith pled guilty in February 2025. Kyle Nagy remains at large.

SafeMoon was the TikTok era's BitConnect: a community-driven hype machine that enriched its creators at the expense of millions of retail investors who thought they were early.