Kanye West, the highly controversial rapper now known as Ye, has launched a memecoin, following in the footsteps of U.S. president Donald Trump who announced his own coin in January.
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The price of the memecoin, called YZE, surged following the launch, climbing almost 1,000% in minutes and briefly hitting a market capitalization of $3 billion before falling back sharply to around $1.5 billion, according to CoinGecko data.
The memecoin launch comes amid a bitcoin price and crypto boom that’s catapulted the value of the combined crypto market to $4 trillion—helped by the technology being embraced by Trump and Wall Street.
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Kanye West has been long-rumored to be launching a memecoin, a bitcoin-like cryptocurrency that’s tied to a person, joke or culture.
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“The official Yeezy token just dropped,” West said in a video posted to his X account shortly after the cryptocurrency was released, alongside a link to Yeezy Money, described on its website as a “concept to put you in control, free from centralized authority.”
West, who has been dropped by sponsors and record labels in recent years due to anti-semetic comments, was “de-banked” by JPMorgan in 2022 shortly after Forbes named him as a billionaire with a personal net worth of $2 billion. That fortune has since declined to around $400 million.
Alongside the YZY cryptocurrency, built on the memecoin-heavy solana blockchain, the Yeezy Money project includes a Ye Pay payment processor, and a YZY card for spending YZY and the stablecoin USDC.
Memecoins, such as Donald Trump’s cryptocurrency, are designed around a joke, idea or culture, with their prices often reflecting the popularity of the “meme.”
Dogecoin, one of the oldest memecoins, is a top-ten cryptocurrency by market capitalization, worth a total of $33 billion compared to bitcoin’s $2.2 trillion.
In December last year, Haliey Welch, who achieved internet fame with the viral “hawk tuah” video, launched her own memecoin only to see its value fall sharply, with Welch facing lawsuits and admitting she didn’t understand the technology.
“I couldn’t tell you how crypto worked the day that coin launched,” Welch said during an episode of her podcast Talk Tuah in May. “I had no idea. I don’t know. So that screwed me.”
Trump’s memecoin has declined steadily since its January launch, falling to a market capitalization of $1.7 billion, down from a peak of almost $9 billion shortly after its launch.
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Kanye West’s YZY memecoin saw its value surge to give it a market capitalization of $3 billion shortly after launch amid a bitcoin price and crypto boom.
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The Trump family’s embrace of crypto came after they claimed to suffer similar “de-banking” by the financial establishment.
World Liberty Financial, the decentralized finance (DeFi) company created by Trump’s sons, was founded as a direct response the debanking that Eric and his brother Don Jr claimed to have suffered.
“I never thought I’d fall into the world of crypto until every bank began cancelling us for absolutely no reason other than the fact that my father was in politics,” Eric Trump told Fox Business in April, while discussing the “weaponization” of banks against the Trump family. “They came after us viciously. It wasn’t until that time that I realized how important crypto was.”
In 2020, during an appearance on comedian Joe Rogan’s podcast, West said he thinks “geniuses” in the bitcoin and cryptocurrency community “have a perspective” on the “true liberation of America and humanity.”
“These guys really have a perspective on what the true liberation of America and humanity will be,” West told Rogan, well into a more than three-hour long interview that spanned the origins of his presidential run, his thoughts on the coronavirus pandemic, and the future of humanity.
“A lot of the tech guys, but specifically [bitcoin] guys were able to use the new highways, the new information highways, and create the next frontier of our existence while the powers of our political system are still anchoring on the electoral college, which was based around slavery.”