Economy

DoomSol’s Rise and Fall: Where the Money Behind Sandy Petersen’s $DOOM Coin Went

Sandy Petersen's $DOOM memecoin hit $8.2 million in a day, lost 99%, and now its rescue team has quit. We looked at the public record to see where the money went.

DoomSol's Rise and Fall: Where the Money Went
Elara Neuralink
By Elara Neuralink, News Host, Author, Gamer
Published on October 14, 2026 · 9 min read
$SOL-1.23%

The developer who tried to save the $DOOM memecoin has quit. On October 13, the X user @Befbunny wrote that “$DOOM was a rug pull that I tried to rescue from scratch,” and that “legal issues with Bethesda forced me to stop” [1]. That came three weeks after Kotaku reported Bethesda was sending legal counsel after DoomSol, the browser game built to promote the coin [2]. Doom designer Sandy Petersen spent the coin’s first week pushing it hard on X. Since then, most of the coverage has run on one word: rug. So we went to the blockchain to see where the money actually went. The answer is messier, and more interesting, than one word.

A quick note before we dig in. A blockchain shows what wallets did, not who owns them. Everything below comes from public records and from what people posted themselves, but there is a lot we cannot know for sure. We cannot tell who controls any of the wallets we mention, whether wallets that share funding belong to the same person, or whether every small payment went to a real player. We also do not know what anyone involved knew at the time, or who Bethesda’s lawyers contacted. Dollar figures are our estimates, based on prices when the money moved. Nobody named here has been charged with anything, and this article does not accuse anyone of wrongdoing. Our goal is to lay out what the public record shows so readers can judge it for themselves.

In this first-person screenshot from DoomSol, the player holds a pistol in an industrial corridor while looking at several defeated enemies on the ground beneath red lighting and near a wall of spikes.
In this first-person screenshot from DoomSol, the player holds a pistol in an industrial corridor while looking at several defeated enemies on the ground beneath red lighting and near a wall of spikes.

A Doom legend joins a memecoin

$DOOM launched on pump.fun on the evening of August 3, 2026 [3]. The pitch was simple. Play a version of Doom in your browser, climb the leaderboard, and win SOL, Solana’s main currency. Petersen, who designed many of the original Doom levels, was the face of it. That night he hosted an X Space and posted, “Looking forward to building the $DOOM community with everyone and will be here with you guys pushing!” [4]

Then he bought in on camera. “I just bought on @fomo,” he wrote, with a video of a $187 purchase [5]. Less than half an hour later came “Just dropped another $1000 on Doom” [6]. Hours after that, he told players to “Play now and earn SOL for free” [7]. When a crypto trader pointed out that Bethesda owns Doom, Petersen answered, “Doom’s open license makes it safe for me to use, but obviously anyone can send lawyers at any time for any reason, however specious” [8].

The hype worked, for about a day. On the afternoon of August 4, $DOOM hit a market cap of about $8.2 million [3]. That was the top. Today it sits near $58,000, down more than 99% [9].

Each day's highest and closing market cap for $DOOM on its main trading pool, in thousands of US dollars, from the 3rd of August to the 13th of October 2026.
$DOOM market cap, daily high and close: data table
DateDaily highDaily close
Aug 31,898402
Aug 48,2142,626
Aug 53,8641,487
Aug 61,556800
Aug 7927662
Aug 81,627714
Aug 9836449
Aug 10735503
Aug 11674437
Aug 12492302
Aug 13346288
Aug 14349279
Aug 15423284
Aug 16303279
Aug 17333239
Aug 18344263
Aug 19345271
Aug 20350298
Aug 21331275
Aug 22333253
Aug 23299288
Aug 24383286
Aug 25327267
Aug 26918760
Aug 27931627
Aug 28755546
Aug 29574437
Aug 30685515
Aug 311,275831
Sep 1899448
Sep 2540368
Sep 3469358
Sep 4487309
Sep 5367327
Sep 6351298
Sep 7328297
Sep 8331239
Sep 9288251
Sep 10269233
Sep 11281238
Sep 12268238
Sep 13238214
Sep 14236221
Sep 15247237
Sep 16275271
Sep 17279279
Sep 18428287
Sep 19367351
Sep 20355319
Sep 21676207
Sep 22252167
Sep 23228136
Sep 24151140
Sep 25155147
Sep 26149136
Sep 27140126
Sep 2812788
Sep 299795
Sep 309691
Oct 19265
Oct 26859
Oct 36160
Oct 46159
Oct 56455
Oct 65653
Oct 75952
Oct 85750
Oct 97060
Oct 106261
Oct 116464
Oct 126661
Oct 136158

Insiders got in first and sold first

The biggest early winners were not fans. In the very same moment the coin was created, a group of linked wallets bought almost 30% of all the tokens for about $870 [10]. That kind of timing is very hard to pull off by chance, since most buyers only find a coin after it goes live. Minutes later, that stake was split up across 17 other wallets, which made it look like a crowd of separate buyers.

Then those wallets sold, and they sold fast. They took in about $189,000, and most of it came on launch night, before the coin ever hit its peak. The first sale landed less than a minute before Petersen posted his second launch video of the evening. The next morning, most of the group moved its money out within about seven minutes. Some of the wallets that paid for this group also paid for the wallet that launched the coin. That does not prove one person was behind all of it. It does show the launcher and the early sellers drew money from the same place.

In this first-person perspective screenshot from DoomSol, the player character holds a pistol while standing in green slime and looking toward an alcove containing defeated red enemies beneath a notification that reads 'PICKED UP A BOX OF BULLETS'.
In this first-person perspective screenshot from DoomSol, the player character holds a pistol while standing in green slime and looking toward an alcove containing defeated red enemies beneath a notification that reads ‘PICKED UP A BOX OF BULLETS’.

So was it a rug pull?

That depends on what you mean. Kotaku wrote that “whoever created the coin pulled the rug,” linking to a single anonymous X post from August 4 [2] [11]. Polygon later said the rug pull happened “as early as Aug. 4” [12].

The classic rug pull, where the creator yanks out the money that lets people trade, never happened. The trading pool stayed locked [13]. The wallet that launched the coin never sold a single token either. It locked its 2% share until August 2027 [14]. Petersen’s son, Arthur, pointed this out on August 7: “the original owner of the token only had 2% of the first tokens, and it is locked up and not sold” [15]. He was right about that. But the launcher did not need to sell. The money left through the insiders who bought first, and through the fees.

Follow the fees

Pump.fun pays a coin’s creator a share of the trading fees. $DOOM traded about $15.8 million on August 4 alone [9], so the launcher’s fee account filled up fast. Here is roughly where that money went:

  • About $104,000 went to one brand-new wallet over eight days [16]. We do not know who controls it.
  • Roughly $15,000 went out in thousands of tiny payments that look like player rewards, most of them worth less than a quarter [17].
  • About $10,000 went to the wallet that made the $1,000 buy Petersen posted about, minutes before he posted it [18].

The player rewards were the part Petersen talked about most. On August 5 he said “1978 players paid out which is all verifiable on-chain via the website which lists the TXs” [19]. Payments like that did go out, but they shrank fast, and they stopped on August 26. At our best estimate, the one unknown wallet got about seven times more than all of those small payments put together.

The $1,000 buy matters because of what the Petersens said about fees. The wallet that made it got its money from the coin’s launcher, right after the launcher collected a big batch of fees, and then bought exactly $999.92 of $DOOM [20]. We cannot see who holds that wallet’s keys. Its amounts and timing match Petersen’s posts, though, and its pump.fun profile now carries his X handle [21]. On August 5, Arthur wrote that “Sandy is getting the fees” and was “investing some of those fees into the doom coin himself” [22]. That fits what the chain shows. Three weeks later, Petersen told it differently: “I’m getting the fees (which I was not, before).” In the same post he said, “I don’t know much about crypto. I think I was an easy target” [23].

In this first-person view from DoomSol, the player character stands in a green-hued corridor facing an enemy that is falling backward near a large metallic door structure against a backdrop of red sky and floating platforms.
In this first-person view from DoomSol, the player character stands in a green-hued corridor facing an enemy that is falling backward near a large metallic door structure against a backdrop of red sky and floating platforms.

The rescue that didn’t last

After two quiet weeks, a new team stepped in. On August 27, pump.fun moved the coin’s creator role to the same wallet that had made the $1,000 buy [24], and Arthur posted that the switch meant “Sandy gets 100% of the fees” [25]. On September 1, Petersen said he had “been taking in fees” and was “voluntarily and sizably reducing my share” [26].

The new team, led by @Befbunny, launched a beta at play.doomsol.io on August 31. It changed the deal. The game had been sold as free to earn, and now “To be eligible to earn rewards, you’ll need to be a holder of some $DOOM” [27]. On September 15, @Befbunny wrote, “I did not create DOOM. I stepped in after the original project was abandoned following what we believe was a rug involving roughly $2 – 3M” [28].

Then Bethesda showed up. Its spokesperson told Kotaku, “When there is a risk of confusion around affiliation or endorsement, we take appropriate steps to preserve that clarity” [2]. Bethesda did not tell Kotaku who the legal letter went to. The coin briefly jumped minutes after the story went live, then sank to new lows within a week [9].

Today, both doomsol.io addresses return a “not found” error from their web host, with a security certificate for the wrong site. That mismatch is why browsers warn people away. The rescue team is gone. Petersen has not posted about the game in over a month. And about 6,100 wallets are still holding $DOOM [29], now trading at a tiny fraction of its peak price.

Honestly, we wish this one had worked out. A free Doom game where good players could win a little crypto is a fun idea, and having one of the people who built the original levels involved made it even cooler. Crypto gaming could use more games people actually want to play, and Doom has been exactly that for over thirty years. We would have loved to see DoomSol grow into something like that, with real payouts, a clear story about who was running it, and the blessing of the people who own Doom. Instead, money problems and legal trouble buried it in about ten weeks. Maybe someone will get it right one day, with the license sorted out first. We would happily play it.

References

  1. ↑ “X post by @Befbunny” (English) X Post
  2. ↑ “Kotaku: Bethesda’s legal action over the Doom-themed memecoin (Sept. 21, 2026)” (English) Kotaku
  3. ↑ “pump.fun token page for $DOOM (all-time high market cap)” pump.fun
  4. ↑ “X post by @SandyofCthulhu” (English) X Post
  5. ↑ “X post by @SandyofCthulhu” (English) X Post
  6. ↑ “X post by @SandyofCthulhu” (English) X Post
  7. ↑ “X post by @SandyofCthulhu” (English) X Post
  8. ↑ “X post by @SandyofCthulhu” (English) X Post
  9. ↑ “GeckoTerminal price and volume history, $DOOM/SOL PumpSwap pool” GeckoTerminal
  10. ↑ “Solana transaction: three wallets buy 293.6M $DOOM in the launch slot” Solscan
  11. ↑ “X post by @CryptoScamHuntO” (English) X Post
  12. ↑ “Polygon: Bethesda goes after memecoin creator for exploiting Doom IP (Sept. 22, 2026)” (English) Polygon
  13. ↑ “Rugcheck report for $DOOM (liquidity lock and top holders)” Rugcheck
  14. ↑ “Solana transaction: deployer locks 20.15M $DOOM in Streamflow” Solscan
  15. ↑ “X post by @existoid” (English) X Post
  16. ↑ “Solana wallet: received 1,432.64 SOL from the deployer” Solscan
  17. ↑ “Solana wallet: $DOOM deployer” Solscan
  18. ↑ “Solana transaction: deployer sends 135.65 SOL to HU7ddpgR” Solscan
  19. ↑ “X post by @SandyofCthulhu” (English) X Post
  20. ↑ “Solana transaction: HU7ddpgR buys 240,516 $DOOM for 999.92 USDC” Solscan
  21. ↑ “pump.fun profile of wallet HU7ddpgR” pump.fun
  22. ↑ “X post by @existoid” (English) X Post
  23. ↑ “X post by @SandyofCthulhu” (English) X Post
  24. ↑ “Solana transaction: pump.fun admin reassigns $DOOM’s creator to HU7ddpgR, Aug. 27” Solscan
  25. ↑ “X post by @existoid” (English) X Post
  26. ↑ “X post by @SandyofCthulhu” (English) X Post
  27. ↑ “X post by @Befbunny” (English) X Post
  28. ↑ “X post by @Befbunny” (English) X Post
  29. ↑ “GeckoTerminal token page for $DOOM (holder count)” GeckoTerminal

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