A decades-old wildlife research program has found an unlikely second life on the Solana blockchain. The Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory's yellow-bellied marmot study, led by UCLA professor Daniel Blumstein and running continuously since 1962, began posting to OnlyFans this year to plug a widening funding gap — and crypto traders responded by minting more than ten meme coins in the project's honor.
The account, branded "OnlyMarms," has pulled in roughly $4,000 since launch, a modest sum against the $75,000 to $100,000 the research team says it needs annually to keep the long-running study going. Blumstein has been candid about what prompted the pivot to adult-content platforms, telling Decrypt that shrinking federal science funding left the lab searching for unconventional revenue streams.
Meme coins the researchers never asked for
Members of the crypto community, not the research team itself, independently created the OnlyMarms-inspired tokens on Pump.fun, the Solana-based launchpad that has become the go-to venue for rapid-fire meme coin issuance. Blumstein said he was caught off guard by the development but has come to see it as a strange kind of goodwill.
"People have independently created a meme coin...this is a meme coin for good," Blumstein said.
The comparison to Moo Deng, the pygmy hippo whose 2024 meme coin briefly touched a market capitalization of roughly $680 million, is not lost on observers of crypto's animal-mascot economy. Whether any OnlyMarms-linked token approaches that scale remains to be seen, and Blumstein has stressed the lab has no formal relationship with the coins or their creators.
A wider funding squeeze
Beyond the meme coin windfall, the marmot project has also struck a partnership with a Colorado brewery for a beer called "Marmot Tears" IPA, with proceeds funneling back to the research. Asked directly whether the current funding environment for basic science in the U.S. troubled him, Blumstein did not mince words.
"No. It's appalling," he said.
He added that the OnlyFans experiment has opened an unexpected channel to a different kind of audience. "Maybe this is a different audience than most of our science communication reaches," Blumstein said, framing the pivot less as a gimmick and more as a survival strategy for a study that has tracked the same alpine rodent population for more than 60 years.
