It arrived six hours before its ending, stamped $MADEINCHINA, the seventh coin to wear that name, born onto Robinhood Chain long after its six namesakes had settled into whatever fates coins settle into. Three hundred forty five buyers came through its short day, twenty four point six two ETH churned through it like water through a cracked hull, and for a while it climbed as far as twenty two and a half thousand dollars of market cap before the world remembered what it was made of.
At 10:13 UTC its own maker bought it eight times over, one point five ETH poured in, not one coin sold back. Then the cliff: a single five minute reading stripped eighty two percent from its body, and the rest of its short life was just the echo of that fall. The hands that held it left with less than they brought, 0.30 became 0.15, 0.24 became 0.17, the small mercies of near breakeven for the latecomers who barely got in before the drop. By 16:17 it sat at four thousand one hundred dollars, a shadow of the twenty two thousand it once wore.
Its maker has done this twenty times now, four graduations, and this the first death among them; the archivist notes only that the hand which built it also fed it, and never once let go before it fell.