CTO (Community Takeover)

A CTO — community takeover — is when a memecoin’s holders assume control after the original developer abandons or dumps the project: new socials, new website, and relabeled listings on trackers. A few CTOs have reached nine-figure market caps; the overwhelming majority still go to zero.

The canonical example is BILLY on Solana (July 2024): the dev dumped and left, holders rebuilt the socials and petitioned trackers to relabel the token, and it ran past $100M market cap on pure community coordination. The lesson degens actually take from it: a CTO label on a tracker means the community is alive, not that the token is safe.