Recently, celebrity memes have swept the crypto community again, from JENNER released by Kardashian's transgender stepfather Caitlyn Jenner to MOTHER released by female rapper Iggy Azalea. The hundreds of times increase has brought the craze of meme coins to a new level.

Related reading: 《From JENNER to MOTHER, are celebrity coins the new favorite or the new pit in crypto? 》

On May 29, the day when MOTHER went online, 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 so far, I am very dissatisfied with "this round of celebrity experiments"," and even attached a "vomiting" expression in the tweet.

IGGY "death", MOTHER "life"

Vitalik's anger is due to the fact that these celebrity memes use financialization as the final product rather than as a means to achieve the goal, which also means that this type of meme coin is more fraudulent, and the entire release 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, which is also the only way to make cryptocurrency more mainstream and let them benefit from the attention economy."

After Caitlyn Jenner, Sahil Arora found Iggy Azalea.

According to crypto KOL @0xSunNFT, 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, and 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 not appeared even on Iggy's Onlyfans. Another crypto community member @0xEdwin999 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.

Given 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 coins on his own, 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, while Iggy began to plummet.

As for Sahil’s so-called pre-sale rewards, namely “whitelists and part of the profits of subsequent projects”, naturally no one believes it anymore. As @0xSunNFT said, “This method of writing blank checks is no different from Rug.”

Vitalik: Very dissatisfied with celebrity memes in this cycle

For 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 follow the trend in some way rather than go against the current. 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, make good meme coins (those that support public goods) outnumber bad meme coins (those that simply enrich insiders and creators), that is, make games instead of issuing tokens, and create projects that people like to participate in.

Related reading: "Vitalik talks about meme again: what is the imagination space for meme coins? "

But for this round of celebrity memes, Vitalik is dissatisfied with their strong financialization attributes, and he uses Stoner Cats to satirize celebrity memes in 2024.

Stoner Cats is a collectible NFT minting project to support Hollywood actress Mila Kunis and her friends in making an animated short film, in which Vitalik once 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.

The public welfare goal means that its purpose is not to enrich celebrities and early adopters, but should be art projects, or celebrities' favorite charities. And the interesting mechanism is 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 celebrity coins?

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, those who agreed with Vitalik began to promote projects built for non-financial purposes such as charity. They are either investors in the project or founders of the project.

On the other hand, the voices against Vitalik said, "Isn't the whole meaning of celebrity meme nonsense?" Some people also bluntly stated that Vitalik was dissatisfied because Ethereum had low transaction volume, while Solana brought huge liquidity because of various memes.

And Iggy arrogantly said "he's just hungry". Uniswap founder Hayden has a positive attitude towards celebrity memes. He believes that there is no problem with meme coins or celebrity coins and they are worthy of attention. Because the fundamental purpose and value of the technology go 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 social causes or something else. Instead, she condescended to treat the best builders in the entire space, proving his point."

In order to refute Vitalik, community members said that celebrity memes would 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 cryptocurrency to do more."

According to Iggy, she has donated the funds from this project to a charity that saves koalas from chlamydia. Moreover, Iggy seems to have more plans.

If the proceeds of MOTHER are indeed used for charitable projects, then this seems to fit 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 people in the industry and thus be hyped and fermented.

As @CaesarsCalls said, "I've been working hard, 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 preaching the right things." @CryptonianNuke also believes that "powerful thinkers and leaders are busy developing and ignoring who has become influential in this field."

Of course, Vitalik's concerns are not unreasonable. According to past experience, celebrity memes, like celebrity NFTs, end up returning to zero or rug. At present, celebrity meme coins often distort the market more than they contribute.

But currently 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 coin is still rising, and today it ranks in the top three of the real-time increase list.

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