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Iggy Azalea’s MOTHER Meme Coin Turned $3K into $9 Million for 1 Lucky Crypto Trader
Rapper Iggy Azalea’s MOTHER token hit another all-time high on Thursday, extending the gains of Solana’s latest hot meme coin and inviting criticism of the highly risky and sometimes infamous celebrity cryptocurrency subsector.
Just over a week after launch, the MOTHER token reached a market cap of $200 million, minting millionaires among some iron-fisted players who have seen price gains of 90% in the last 24 hours alone. Azalea turned her powerful X account (formerly Twitter) into a platform to promote the token to her 8 million followers.
These impressive totals have propelled MOTHER into the upper echelons of Solana’s fast-growing meme coin sector. Nowadays, anyone can, within minutes, create a token satirizing anything. Here, the person is Australian rapper Iggy Azalea, and the thing is, well, a photo of her butt.
MOTHER is the second largest asset by market capitalization to emerge from the meme coin factory Bomb.Funthe outpost partially responsible for the floods Solana with half a million new tokens only in May, per The Block. Players who purchased MOTHER on Bomb.Fun and detainees are receiving a huge windfall. O top wallet had about $3,200 worth of the token on May 28; As of Thursday morning, his position was worth nearly $9 million.
Like many meme coins, MOTHER does not claim any value proposition. Holders do not receive payments for album sales, as some Royalty-Infused NFTs to do. They also do not have the right to vote that some fan tokens issued by football teams carry. The value of EMA is purely a function of demand for a currency that some speculators are betting could rise even higher.
All this foam has renewed scrutiny of so-called celebrity tokens.
On Wednesday, the founder of Ethereum Vitalik Buterin criticized celebrity tokens that promote “financialization as a means to an end” and lack a greater purpose. Hours later, Azalea subtweeted him with a photoshopped image depicting herself breastfeeding a Buterin baby. “He was hungry,” she wrote, using slang for a hunger-induced bad mood.
This cheeky aside brought more criticism from the philosophical corner of cryptography. Hayden Adams, creator of the decentralized trading protocol Uniswap, which pioneered the token swap technology behind meme coin on-chain trading and basically everything else, chided Azalea for lampooning “the best builder in the entire space” while it couldn’t leverage its cryptographic foray for some greater purpose.
What started as a million-dollar joke has turned into a debate about the purpose of encryption itself.
On Thursday morning, Evgeny Gaevoy of market boss Wintermute belittled Adams and Buterin’s efforts to “solve capitalism”. “I don’t know guys, I’m with Iggy on this🙃,” he posted in X.
Still, MOTHER still has a long way to go before it graduates to the big leagues of meme coins. Blockgraze, a pseudonymous crypto trader who turned $1,500 into millions of dollars in early staking on Dogwifhat (WIF), said celebrity coins like MOTHER face more “failure vectors” than regular joke tokens.
“In addition to all the ways a regular meme coin can fail, you have all the additional errors and risks of linking to it personally. She could get bored, tweet the wrong thing, face personal legal action/whatever,” Blockgraze said.
Azalea’s rise as a top bull evangelist is helping to support MOTHER’s price in a way few other celebrity tokens have managed to achieve. Her X posts circulate cheeky memes every hour, slamming haters and bringing more attention – and excitement – to MOM. She also changed her profile picture to Mad Lads NFT, Solana’s most valuable collectible.
“The Iggy coin itself is really interesting only because it seems to be trying to maintain it and so far the price reflects people who appreciate it,” Blockgraze said.
Celebrities have an infamous history of promoting cryptocurrencies. There’s Larry David’s flashy Super Bowl FTX Ad, which led to lawsuits from customers of the bankrupt and fraudulent exchange. Former boxer Floyd Mayweather landed in Hot water twice in fraudulent promotions. And Kim Kardashian faced SEC Penalties to increase a token.
MOTHER differs from those in many aspects, mainly in its proximity to the source. While it is unclear whether Azalea herself created the token in Bomb.Fun, it is technically plausible that she did this. Despite everything, she has promoted the asset from the very beginning.
The token is called “development portfolio” (Bomb.Fun labels wallets of token creators as “developers” despite not needing any technical skills to create a token) held nearly $5 million worth of MOTHER Thursday.
Azalea was not immediately available for an interview Thursday. On a publish on X in late May, she described some of her reasoning: