In a true Christmas miracle, a viral crypto stunt actually seems to be doing some good in the world.

Siqi Chen, an investor and startup founder, took to X on Christmas Eve to share a GoFundMe campaign he created to fund research into a rare brain tumor afflicting his 5-year-old daughter. His daughter, Mira, was diagnosed in September with adamantinomatous craniopharyngioma — a benign tumor that is usually not fatal but causes severe side effects. 

Chen said the family is working with Dr. Todd Hankinson at the University of Colorado on treatments to slow the tumor’s growth. Because this cancer is so rare, he said, research is sparse and funding is lacking. “this christmas, i am humbly asking for your help to support dr. hankinson’s research,” he tweeted.

His online fundraiser raised more than $233,000 of its $300,000 goal in two days. But the most heartwarming part had nothing to do with GoFundMe.

Late in the evening on Christmas Day, Chen took to X again — this time in surprise. 

“uh so some random guy 20 minutes [ago] made a SOL memecoin called $MIRA to help with research fundraising and sent me half the entire supply and it’s now worth like $400K and i literally don’t know what to do,” he wrote.

The memecoin — internet parlance for a cryptocurrency created on a lark, often based on a joke — skyrocketed in value as crypto enthusiasts traded it among themselves. Chen started selling off small portions of his holding Wednesday evening, promising to donate 100% of the proceeds to Hankinson’s laboratory. “CAN SOME PLEASE EXPLAIN HOW THIS MAGIC INTERNET MONEY WORKS I AM LOSING MY MIND,” he wrote less than half an hour after his initial tweet, when the value of his holdings soared to nearly $6 million. 

Chen continued tweeting his disbelief as the value soared to $11 million, then $14.7 million, then $18.8 million. By Thursday morning, he had sold enough of the token to send at least $1 million to Hankinson’s lab, he said. “yi, mira and i are so unbelievably grateful to you all — each and every one of you,” he wrote. “christmas magic was made real this year thanks to all of you. forever grateful.”

Perhaps no one was more surprised than Hankinson, who learned of the memecoin Thursday morning via excited texts from friends and coworkers. “This entire area of the world — Bitcoin and NFTs and stuff — I do not know a single thing about it,” he told The Standard. “So when all this stuff started going on, I was like, ‘What?’” 

Hankinson said he has studied adamantinomatous craniopharyngioma for more than 15 years, and his lab is the only one in North America dedicated to its treatment. He said funding is hard to come by both because the condition is rare — fewer than two in a million people are diagnosed with AC every year — and because it does not grow as aggressively as some other tumors. Still, he said, the side effects can be devastating: stunted growth; vision impairment; and difficulty regulating hunger, thirst, and temperature.

If the Chen family did contribute $1 million, he said, it would be by far the largest donation the lab has ever received.

“Even if it ends up being a small fraction of what people have talked about, it would still be a complete game changer for the scale on which we can do things and the sophistication with which we do things,” he said. “This would be the most insane Christmas gift our research has ever gotten.”

Hankinson and Chen weren’t the only ones surprised by the use of a memecoin to fund medical research. These trend-based tokens are primarily known as risky, volatile investments — more of a gag than a serious asset. (The creators of a memecoin tied to Hailey Welch, better known as the “Hawk Tuah” Girl, are being sued by investors after its value dropped 95% in a single day.) They are sometimes used in crypto scams known as “rug pulls,” in which founders create a token, convince people to invest in it, then rapidly sell all their holdings.

Chen said repeatedly on Twitter that he was trying to avoid a “rug pull” situation by selling off his holdings in the “MIRA” coin slowly. He said Thursday that he would sell $1,000 worth of the token every 10 minutes until it runs out. Still, the value of the coin has dropped significantly from its overnight high. 

That crash — coupled with the fact that early sellers of the coin likely made a tidy profit — made some observers uneasy. But Chen said he didn’t mind.

“if you made a lot of money, i’m genuinely happy for you — but please consider donating some of your profits to hankinson lab,” he tweeted. “if you lost a lot of money, i’m very sorry —  but magic internet money is magic internet money.”

Chen is a well-regarded figure in Silicon Valley who founded and sold two startups and worked at several others before his current venture, a finance software company called Runway. Among those responding to his tweets were Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire, and X CEO Linda Yaccarino.

In a Twitter Space on Wednesday night, Chen explained that his daughter initially presented with a headache, which he and his wife thought little about until they brought her to a pediatrician who suggested an MRI. Doctors have since placed Mira on an arthritis medication that could slow the growth of the tumor, and they are weighing the benefits of surgery. “Our strategy right now is just to try everything we can to buy as much time as possible,” he said.