Kanye West’s official Solana meme coin, YZY, is down nearly 81% from its peak only a week after launch as the rapper contends with what he said is an Instagram hack that promoted a fake token of the same name.
The real YZY token on Solana has risen nearly 1% today, while the impostor version sits 96% off its all-time high price, now trading just above a $160,000 market cap.
“My Instagram has been hacked and it’s following a fake coin,” Kanye posted to X, adding the official token’s X account and Solana contract address which ends in “YEEZY.”
The pop culture icon’s Instagram account, which boasts nearly 20 million followers, followed only two accounts around 1:45 p.m. ET on Tuesday—his partner Bianca Censori and a profile named “yzytoken.”
That profile promotes what West calls a “fake coin,” a YZY token that was launched on popular Solana meme coin launchpad Pump.fun earlier Tuesday.
The profile’s bio lists the impostor token’s contract address alongside the real token address, and has a single post from around 2:00 a.m. ET with a QR code and the text “(‘Restart now? (y/n): ‘) == ‘y.’”
West’s following of the fake token page alone was enough to send it to around a $7 million market cap at its peak before it came crashing down.
Kanye’s real meme coin was launched last week after months of speculation that a token tied to the rapper was eventually going to debut. The launch sent a handful of unaffiliated Kanye-related tokens plummeting, dropping as much as 88%.
But the real Kanye token hasn’t performed particularly well either since its launch. After storming out of the gate to a nearly $3 billion fully diluted value (FDV), YZY is down nearly 81% and sitting just above a $565 million FDV. The current market cap is barely $73.5 million, as of this writing.
Despite its lack of overwhelming success among traders, insiders and other early investors benefited heavily from the token launch, including around $12 million of profits tied to Hayden Davis—one of the individuals behind the controversial Libra meme coin launch that was promoted by Argentine president Javier Milei in February.
Libra Wallets Linked to Hayden Davis Made $12 Million on Kanye West’s Meme Coin
As of 2:18p.m. ET, Kanye’s Instagram was no longer following the “yzytoken” page that had promoted the fake coin.