Original author: Lucy
Recently, celebrity memes have once again swept the crypto community, from JENNER released by Kardashian's transgender stepfather Caitlyn Jenner, to MOTHER released by female rapper Iggy Azalea. The hundreds-fold increase has brought the craze for meme coins to a new level.
Related reading: "From JENNER to MOTHER, is celebrity currency a new favorite or a new pitfall in cryptocurrencies?"
On May 29, the day MOTHER was launched, according to Lookonchain monitoring, in just 5 hours, a trader spent 5.14 SOL to buy 86.55 million MOTHERs, and the current profit is 762 times. Although it was once in a zero state, according to birdeye data, as of the time of writing, the price of MOTHER reached $0.144, an increase of more than 2,700 times according to the opening.
Such a crazy scene eventually angered Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin. On June 5, Vitalik said on the social media platform that "I am very dissatisfied with this round of celebrity experiments so far", and even attached a "vomiting" expression in the tweet.
IGGY "dies", MOTHER "lives"
Vitalik’s anger is due to the fact that these celebrity memes use financialization as an end product rather than as a means to achieve an end, which also means that such meme coins are more fraudulent, and the entire launch process of MOTHER is as dramatic as JENNER.
Sahil Arora has to be mentioned in this story. He is also a key figure in this celebrity meme coin craze. According to an interview with Decrypt, Sahil Aror revealed that he has participated in many celebrity projects. "Sometimes I go to them, most of the time they come to me, and then I choose who to work with. This is also the only way to make cryptocurrency more mainstream and let them benefit from the attention economy."
After Caitlyn Jenner, Sahil Arora approached Iggy Azalea.
According to crypto KOL @0x SunNFT, in the early morning of May 28, Sahil said in his Tg channel that he would help Iggy issue tokens and gave an address, saying that the first 100 wallets that remitted money would be eligible to participate in the pre-sale. After the quota was met, Sahil suddenly announced that the number of wallets would be expanded to 700. Coupled with JENNER's criminal record, this suspicious move made the community uneasy.
However, in the morning, Iggy posted tweets related to cryptocurrency, which increased the credibility of the coin issuance, but Iggy also claimed that he would not cooperate with Sahil.
That night, @muzzyvermillion found a meme coin called MOTHER on pump.fun, with a picture of Iggy’s butt selfie, which had never appeared on Iggy’s Onlyfans. Another crypto community member @0x Edwin 999 found that the front-row chips were basically not shipped. At that time, the market value of MOTHER was only about 2 million US dollars, which was a very high profit and loss ratio for the meme issued on pump.fun.
In view of Iggy’s previous statement of non-cooperation, @muzzyvermillion highly suspected that MOTHER was Iggy’s meme coin and chose to buy it. But then Sahil announced the deployment of the IGGY contract on pump.fun, MOTHER fell, and @muzzyvermillion also transferred his position to IGGY.
In addition to issuing his own coin, Sahil also claimed that Iggy would soon tweet in support of the meme coin, but what the community waited for was the MOTHER contract released by Iggy. This tweet was forwarded by Ansem, Phantom Wallet and members of major crypto communities. In an instant, MOTHER surged 30 times in 2 minutes, and Iggy began to plummet.
As for Sahil’s so-called pre-sale rewards, namely “whitelisting of subsequent projects and part of the profits”, naturally no one believes it anymore. As @0xSunNFT said, “This method of writing a blank check is no different from Rug.”
Vitalik: Very unhappy with the celebrity memes of this cycle
Regarding the meme craze in this round of bull market, Vitalik once said in a blog post that he values people's desire for fun and would rather the cryptocurrency space go with the trend in some way rather than go against it. Therefore, he hopes to see more attention to higher-quality interesting projects that make positive contributions to the ecosystem and the world around it (rather than just "introducing users").
At least ideally, there would be more good memecoins (those that support public goods) than bad memecoins (those that simply enrich insiders and creators), i.e. making games rather than issuing tokens, creating projects that people enjoy participating in.
Related reading: "Vitalik talks about meme again: What is the room for imagination for meme coins?"
But for this cycle of celebrity memes, Vitalik was dissatisfied with its extremely strong financialization attributes, and he used Stoner Cats to satirize the celebrity memes of 2024.
Stoner Cats is a collectible NFT minting project used to support Hollywood actress Mila Kunis and her friends in making an animated short film, in which Vitalik voiced a cat character.
Vitalik is optimistic about Stoner Cats because it has a purpose other than financialization. To sum it up in his own words, it has some kind of public welfare goal, some kind of interesting mechanism, and can do something that lasts for more than 10 years, rather than bubbling for a few months and then being forgotten.
Public welfare goals mean that the purpose is not to enrich celebrities and early adopters, but should be art projects, or celebrities' favorite charities, etc. Interesting mechanisms are not just trading tokens, such as token voting DAO at least provides people with "something" to do and organize. DAO should not completely determine the agenda, but it can have some influence.
Is it too early to hate on CelebrityCoin?
Chris Burniske, a partner at Placeholder, said, "If MOTHER breaks into sustainable value creation, it will also become the mother of celebrity experiments in this cycle."
It was this comment that triggered Vitalik’s “declaration of dissatisfaction”, and many community members also joined the discussion. On the one hand, those who agreed with Vitalik began to promote projects built for non-financial purposes such as charity. They were either investors in the project or founders of the project.
On the other hand, voices opposing Vitalik said, “Isn’t the whole point of celebrity memes just nonsense?” Others bluntly stated that Vitalik was dissatisfied because Ethereum’s transaction volume was low, while Solana brought huge liquidity due to various memes.
Iggy proudly said "he's just hungry". Uniswap founder Hayden has a positive attitude towards celebrity memes. He believes that there is nothing wrong with meme coins or celebrity coins and they are worthy of attention. Because the fundamental purpose and value of the technology goes far beyond financial games. The best builders in this field are motivated by positive social change.
But he said, "Iggy could have responded positively and donated the profits to a social cause or something, instead she treated the best builder in the entire space condescendingly, proving his point."
To refute Vitalik, community members said that celebrity memes will change the social structure. Among them, @Abbasshaikh42 said, "You only see what CT wants you to see. Financialization is not the final product. Many celebrities or creators may eventually notice these moments of financial depravity and use cryptocurrencies to do more."
According to Iggy, she has used the funds from this project to donate to a charity that saves koalas from chlamydia. And it seems Iggy has more plans.
If the proceeds of MOTHER are indeed used for charity projects, then this seems to meet Vitalik’s definition of a “good meme.” But this also points out a key contradiction: the so-called “good meme” is actually difficult to be exposed and hyped, while the celebrity effect can attract more attention from industry insiders and thus be hyped and fermented.
As @CaesarsCalls said, "I've been trying, but it's hard when people like you are so quiet and uninvolved." At the same time, he said, "If you really care, you will investigate the issue, look at other good leaders, and start promoting the right things." @CryptonianNuke also believes that "powerful thinkers and leaders are busy developing and ignore who has become influential in this field."
Of course, Vitalik’s concerns are not without reason. According to past experience, celebrity memes, like celebrity NFTs, will eventually end up at zero or rugged. Currently, celebrity meme coins often distort the market more than they contribute.
But observing the performance of MOTHER, on June 5, Bitget announced the launch of MOTHER IGGY (MOTHER), and MOTHER continues to be the focus of speculation. As of the time of writing, the price of the currency is still rising, and today it ranks in the top three of the real-time increase list.
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