A Solana memecoin called $ONLYMARMS has done something the researchers behind it could not quite manage on OnlyFans: raise serious money. The community-launched Pumpfun token has pulled in mo
A Solana memecoin called $ONLYMARMS has done something the researchers behind it could not quite manage on OnlyFans: raise serious money. The community-launched Pumpfun token has pulled in more than $14,000 for a 64-year-old marmot study, surpassing the roughly $6,000 generated by the project's own OnlyFans page, according to the lab's own fundraising tracker.
The Marmot Adaptive Dynamics (M.A.D.) Lab at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory tracks yellow-bellied marmots near Crested Butte, Colorado, and has run continuously since 1962, making it one of the longest wildlife studies in the world. It is also the second-oldest study of its kind globally, behind only Jane Goodall's chimpanzee research.
Daniel Blumstein, an ecology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), runs the project and told NPR that a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant denial had reduced their teaching assistants. Since President Trump took office for the second time, his administration has frozen or slashed more than $700 million in NSF grants, and after three unsuccessful attempts to renew their grant, the agency told Blumstein to stop applying.
Blumstein and his team created an OnlyFans page called OnlyMarms, where fans can see daily photos and videos of wild marmots and leave tips to help support the ongoing research. "It's going to be G-rated, and we're not going to sexualize this," Blumstein told The New York Times. Julien Martin, a University of Ottawa professor who co-runs the study, later joined the fundraising push and signed up on Pumpfun himself to claim the token's creator fees for the lab.
One of the more successful endeavors is a community-launched token called OnlyMarms on Pumpfun, a platform that lets anyone create a Solana-based token in minutes. The lab's Marmot Project Instagram account put OnlyFans donations at more than $6,000, after OnlyFans took its 20% cut, while the Pumpfun token has now more than doubled that figure in crypto donations. $ONLYMARMS surged 600% over the last 24 hours and carried a market cap of $2.75 million at time of writing.
The marmot program's other fundraisers include the early July launch of Marmot Tears IPA, a beer brewed by Irwin Brewing Co. in Crested Butte, and an upcoming Fat Marmot Week event in August, inspired by Katmai National Park's Fat Bear Week. Blumstein said the lab is also continuing to pursue traditional grant funding.
The episode has drawn fresh attention to a wider squeeze on American science. The Trump administration cancelled more than 1,700 grants worth some $1.4 billion at the NSF in 2025, and in 2026 the agency has so far awarded just a fraction of the $9 billion it has typically distributed in recent years, with the White House proposing to slash its budget by nearly half for the 2027 fiscal year.
Sources:Yahoo Finance / BeInCrypto: Solana Memecoin OnlyMarms is Outraising OnlyFans Subscriptions for a Marmot StudyUPI: Marmot researchers raising funds with OnlyMarms page on OnlyFansFuturism: Scientists Forced to Go on OnlyFans After Their Funding Was Cut
