Recently, celebrity memes have once again taken the crypto community by storm, from Kardashian’s transgender stepfather Caitlyn Jenner’s release of JENNER to female rapper Iggy Azalea’s release of MOTHER. The hundreds of times increase has brought the craziness of meme coins to a new level.
On May 29, the day MOTHER went online, according to Lookonchain monitoring, in just 5 hours, a trader spent 5.14 SOL to buy 86.55 million MOTHER, and the current profit reached 762 times. Although it was back to zero for a time, 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 finally angered Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin. On June 5, Vitalik stated on the social media platform that "so far, I am very dissatisfied with "this round of celebrity experiments"" and even included a "vomiting" expression in the tweet.
Vitalik's anger is due to the fact that these celebrity memes use financialization as the end product rather than as an end in itself A means, which also means that this type of meme currency is more fraudulent, and the entire release process of MOTHER is as dramatic as JENNER.
In this story I have to mention Sahil Arora, who 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 cooperate with. This is also to make cryptocurrency more mainstream and let them The only way to benefit from the attention economy"
After Caitlyn Jenner, Sahil Arora approached Iggy Azalea.
According to the recollection of crypto KOL @0xSunNFT, in the early morning of May 28, Sahil stated in his Tg channel that he would help Iggy issue tokens and gave an address to the first 100 remittance wallets. Will be eligible to participate in the pre-sale. After reaching the quota, Sahil suddenly announced that he would expand the number of wallets to 700. Coupled with JENNER's criminal record, this suspicious move made the community uneasy.
But in the morning, Iggy posted a tweet related to cryptocurrency, which increased the credibility of the currency, but Iggy also claimed that he would not cooperate with Sahil.
That night, @muzzyvermillion discovered a meme coin called MOTHER on pump.fun. The picture was a selfie of Iggy’s butt, which had not appeared even on Iggy’s own Onlyfans. Another member of the crypto community @0xEdwin999 discovered that the chips in the front row were basically not shipped. At that time, the market value of MOTHER was only about US$2 million, which was a very high profit-loss ratio for the meme issued on pump.fun.
In view of Iggy’s previous non-cooperation statement, @muzzyvermillion had 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 in response, and @muzzyvermillion also moved the position to IGGY.
In addition to self-generated coins, Sahil also claimed that Iggy would soon tweet in support of the meme coin. However, what the community was waiting for was the MOTHER contract released by Iggy. This tweet was forwarded by Ansem, Phantom Wallet and members of the major crypto community. In an instant, MOTHER exploded thirty times in 2 minutes, and at the same time, Iggy began to plummet.
As for Sahil’s so-called pre-sale rewards, namely “whitelist and partial profits for subsequent projects”, naturally no one believes it anymore, as @0xSunNFT said, “This A way of writing a blank check, no different than a Rug.”
Regarding the meme craze of this round of bull market, Vitalik once stated in a blog post that he values people’s desire for fun and would rather the cryptocurrency space Somehow go with the flow instead of swimming against it. Therefore, he would like to see more attention given to higher quality interesting projects that make a positive contribution to the ecosystem and the world around it (rather than just “bringing in users”).
At least ideally, have more good meme coins (those that support public goods) than bad meme coins (those that simply make insiders and creators rich), i.e. make games rather than distribute them Tokens to create projects that people like to participate in.
But for this cycle of celebrity memes, Vitalik is dissatisfied with its extremely financial nature, and at the same time he used Stoner Cats to satirize the celebrity memes of 2024.
Stoner Cats is a collectible NFT minting project to support Hollywood actress Mila Kunis and her friends in the production of animated short films 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 is to have some kind of public welfare goal, some interesting mechanics and be able to make something that lasts 10+ years instead of bubbling around for a few months and then being forgotten.
Public welfare goal means that its purpose is not to enrich celebrities and early adopters, but should be such as art projects, or celebrities' favorite charities, etc. The 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.
Placeholder partner Chris Burniske 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, people who agreed with Vitalik began to promote projects built for non-financial purposes such as charity. Either the investor of the project or the founder of the project.
On the other hand, those who opposed Vitalik said, "Isn't the whole point of celebrity memes just nonsense?" Some people bluntly said that Vitalik was dissatisfied because of the low transaction volume of Ethereum, while Solana was dissatisfied because of various memes. Brings huge liquidity.
Iggy arrogantly stated that "he is just hungry." Uniswap founder Hayden has a positive attitude towards celebrity memes. He believes that meme coins or celebrity coins have no problems and deserve attention. Because the fundamental purpose and value of this technology goes far beyond financial games. The best builders in the field are motivated by positive social change.
But he said, "Iggy could have responded aggressively and donated the profits to a social cause or something, but instead she was condescending to the best builder in the entire space, proving his point." ”.
In countering Vitalik, community members said celebrity memes can change the fabric of society. 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 donated funds from this project to a charity that saves koalas from chlamydia. And, it seems Iggy has more plans.
If the proceeds from MOTHER will indeed be 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 memes" are actually difficult to be exposed and hyped, but the celebrity effect can attract more attention from industry insiders, thereby being hyped and fermented.
Like @CaesarsCalls said, "I've been trying but it's hard when someone like you is so quiet and uninvolved". At the same time, he said, "If you really cared, you would look into this issue, look at other good leaders, and start preaching the right things." @CryptonianNuke also believes that "powerful thinkers and leaders are busy developing and ignore who becomes influential in this field."
Of course, Vitalik’s worries are not unreasonable. According to past experience, celebrity memes and celebrity NFTs will eventually end up at zero or rug. At present, celebrity meme coins tend to distort the market more than they contribute.
But currently observing the performance of MOTHER, on June 5, Bitget announced the listing of MOTHER IGGY (MOTHER). MOTHER continues to be the focus of speculation. As of writing, the currency price is still rising, and it has been listed on the list today The top three in the real-time increase list.
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