Investors who bid on the REAL (REAL) token promoted by former UFC champion Conor McGregor will receive a full refund after the project failed to raise above its $1 million minimum requirement.

“We need to be real. We didn’t hit our minimum raise,” the developers of the Real (REAL) token, Real World Gaming said in an April 6 X post, adding that “All bids will be refunded in full.”

“This is not the end,” RWG said.

The team only managed to raise $392,315 in USDC (USDC) over a 28-hour presale on April 5 and 6 — less than half of the minimum required and approximately 11% of the $3.6 million target, which was conducted via a sealed-bid auction. 

The public sale of 60 million REAL tokens (3% of the total 2 billion REAL supply) initially targeted a fully diluted value of $120 million, with the sealed bid auction starting at $0.06 per token.

Details of the REAL token launch. Source: RWG

Only 668 participants were involved, according to RWG’s data.

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McGregor, a UFC fighter turned entrepreneur and Ireland political candidate, initially claimed that his token would be more legitimate than other celebrity-endorsed tokens, which have frequently resulted in rug pulls:

“This isn’t some celebrity-endorsed bullshit token, it’s a REAL game changer that will improve the crypto ecosystem as well as make REAL change in the world,” McGregor said in a statement shared with Cointelegraph.

Source: Conor McGregor

Was REAL launched at a bad time?

The REAL token launched in the middle of a sharp market downturn — with Bitcoin (BTC) falling, while US stocks saw an estimated $6.6 trillion loss on April 3 and 4 — the largest two-day loss ever as US President Donald Trump’s tariff plans continue to raise recession fears.

Memecoins have also been cooling off since the launch of the Official Trump memecoin on Jan. 18, 2025. The Libra (LIBRA) token scandal involving Argentine President Javier Milei in late February also exacerbated the downward trend.

The once-$100 billion memecoin market has now fallen below $44 billion and is down 13% over the last 24 hours, CoinGecko data shows.

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