MOTHER skyrocketed a thousand times in a week, will Vitalik be "slapped in the face" by celebrity coins?

Author: Luccy, BlockBeats

Recently, celebrity memes have once again swept the crypto community, from the JENNER released by Caitlyn Jenner, the transgender father of the Kardashians, to the MOTHER released by female rapper Iggy Azalea, with hundreds of times increases pushing meme coins to a new level of madness.

On May 29, the day MOTHER launched, according to Lookonchain monitoring, within just 5 hours, a trader spent 5.14 SOL to buy 86.55 million MOTHER, currently yielding 762 times. Although it briefly fell to zero, according to birdeye data, as of the time of writing, the price of MOTHER reached $0.144, with an opening increase of over 2700 times.

Such a crazy scene eventually angered Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin. On June 5, Vitalik expressed on social media, "So far, I am very dissatisfied with 'this round of celebrity experiments'," even attaching a "vomiting" emoji to the tweet.

IGGY "dies," MOTHER "lives"

Vitalik's anger stems from the fact that these celebrity memes are treated as financial products rather than a means to an end, which also means that such meme coins are more fraudulent, and the entire release process of MOTHER was as dramatic as JENNER.

In this story, we must mention Sahil Arora, who is also a key figure in this wave of celebrity meme coins. In an interview with Decrypt, Sahil Arora 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 collaborate 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 approached Iggy Azalea.

According to crypto KOL @0xSunNFT, in the early hours of May 28, Sahil stated in his Tg channel that he would help Iggy issue tokens and provided an address, claiming that the first 100 wallets to send money would qualify for the presale. After reaching the quota, Sahil suddenly announced that the number of wallets would be expanded to 700. Coupled with JENNER's previous incident, this suspicious move made the community uneasy.

However, by the morning, Iggy posted a tweet related to cryptocurrency, increasing the credibility of the token issuance, but Iggy simultaneously claimed she would not cooperate with Sahil.

That night, @muzzyvermillion discovered a meme coin named MOTHER on pump.fun, featuring a selfie of Iggy's butt, a photo that had not even appeared on Iggy's own OnlyFans. Another crypto community member, @0xEdwin999, found that the front-row chips had basically not been sold, and at that time, MOTHER's market cap was only around $2 million, which presented a very high risk-reward ratio for a meme issued on pump.fun.

Given Iggy's previous non-cooperation statement, @muzzyvermillion highly suspected that MOTHER was Iggy's meme coin and chose to buy in. But then Sahil announced the deployment of the IGGY contract on pump.fun, causing MOTHER to plummet, and @muzzyvermillion also shifted their position to IGGY.

In addition to issuing tokens independently, Sahil also claimed that Iggy would soon tweet in support of the meme coin, but what the community received was Iggy's release of the MOTHER contract. This tweet was retweeted by Ansem, Phantom Wallet, and various crypto community members, and in an instant, MOTHER surged thirty times in 2 minutes, while Iggy began to plummet.

As for Sahil's so-called presale rewards, namely "whitelisting for subsequent projects and some profits," naturally, no one believed it anymore. As @0xSunNFT said, "This method of writing blank checks is no different from a rug pull."

Vitalik: Very dissatisfied with this round of celebrity memes

Regarding the meme frenzy of this bull market, Vitalik once stated in a blog post that he values people's desire for fun and would rather the cryptocurrency space go with the flow than swim against the current. Therefore, he hopes to see higher quality interesting projects that make positive contributions to the ecosystem and the world around it (rather than just "bringing in users") receive more attention.

At least ideally, there should be more good meme coins (those that support public goods) than bad meme coins (which merely enrich insiders and creators), meaning creating games instead of issuing tokens, and creating projects that people enjoy participating in.

However, for this round of celebrity memes, Vitalik feels dissatisfied due to their strong financialization attributes, and he satirizes the celebrity memes of 2024 with Stoner Cats.

Stoner Cats is a collectible NFT minting project aimed at supporting Hollywood actress Mila Kunis and her friends in producing animated shorts, and Vitalik voiced a cat character in that animated short.

Vitalik is optimistic about Stoner Cats because it has a purpose beyond financialization. In his own words, it has some kind of public welfare goal, some interesting mechanism, and can do something that lasts more than 10 years, rather than bubbling up for a few months and then being forgotten.

The public welfare goal means that the purpose is not to make celebrities and early adopters rich, but should be like art projects or celebrities' favorite charities. The interesting mechanism is not just about trading tokens; for example, token voting DAOs at least provide people with "something" to do and organize. DAOs should not completely determine the agenda, but they can have some influence.

Is it too early to hate celebrity coins?

Placeholder partner Chris Burniske stated, "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 "dissatisfaction declaration," and many community members joined the discussion. On one hand, those who agree with Vitalik began to promote projects built for non-financial purposes like charity; they are either investors in the projects or the founders of the projects.

On the other hand, voices opposing Vitalik argued, "Isn't the whole point of celebrity memes just nonsense?" Some even bluntly stated that Vitalik's dissatisfaction was due to low Ethereum transaction volumes, while Solana gained huge liquidity from various memes.

Iggy, on the other hand, proudly stated, "He's just hungry," while Uniswap founder Hayden held a positive attitude towards celebrity memes, believing that meme coins or celebrity coins are not problematic and deserve attention. Because the fundamental purpose and value of the technology far exceed financial games. The best builders in this field are motivated by positive social change.

However, he stated, "Iggy could have made a positive response and donated profits to social causes or something else; instead, she looked down on the best builders in the entire space, proving his point."

To counter Vitalik, community members argued that celebrity memes would change social structures. Among them, @Abbasshaikh42 stated, "You only see what CT wants you to see; financialization is not the end product. Many celebrities or creators may eventually notice these moments of financial degradation and use cryptocurrency to do more."

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

If the profits from MOTHER are indeed used for charitable projects, then this seems to align with Vitalik's definition of "good memes." But this also points out a key contradiction: so-called "good memes" are actually difficult to expose and hype, while the celebrity effect can attract more industry insiders' attention, thus being hyped and fermented.

As @CaesarsCalls said, "I've been trying, but when people like you are so quiet and not participating, it's hard." At the same time, he stated, "If you really care, you would investigate the issue, look at other excellent leaders, and start promoting the right things." @CryptonianNuke also believes, "Powerful thinkers and leaders are busy developing and neglecting who becomes influential in this field."

Of course, Vitalik's concerns are not without reason. Based on past experience, celebrity memes, like celebrity NFTs, ultimately end up at zero or rug pulls, and currently, the distortion of the market by celebrity meme coins often outweighs their contributions.

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 coin price is still rising and has made it to the top three on the real-time increase leaderboard.