Iggy Azalea makes money with cryptocurrencies: her “memecoin” earns 194 million dollars in one week

Iggy Azalea knows the power of a meme. On Wednesday afternoon, the Grammy-nominated rapper shared a Photoshopped image of herself breastfeeding Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum. The caption: “he was just angry.”

The meme was designed to troll Buterin by following his I reproach her Solana-based “memecoin”, Mother Iggy ($MOTHER), which began trading last week. Celebrities should only launch cryptocurrencies to serve “some sort of public good,” instead of “financialization as the end product,” she wrote.

Memecoins are a tongue-in-cheek subculture of cryptocurrencies. Anyone can throw a currency in the name of anything. Combining finance, internet trends and gambling, investors flock to highly speculative assets during viral moments.

“I don’t think peace is very profitable when it comes to the memecoin landscape,” Azalea said in an interview with Fortune. “It’s what drives virality, it drives my community and our market cap, and that’s what I’m here to do. So, respectfully, get out of the way.

“The rules of cash, I make my own rules”

Six years after rapping the Texts “Cash rules, I make my own rules,” Azalea is doing, well, just that. After the first week of trading, Mother Iggy’s price increased 1,200% to around $0.20, reaching a market capitalization of more than $190 million. second to CoinMarketCap starting June 7th.

This highlights a larger trend of celebrities turning to memecoins to monetize and engage with their fan base without intermediaries. While some find the trend obnoxious, it appears to be both profitable and effective for some celebrities to find their way back into the spotlight.

“I’ve listened to more Iggy Azalea in the last few days than at any time in the last decade — there might be a lesson in that,” Teddy Fusaro, president of Bitwise Asset Management, told Fortune.

The casting of Mother Iggy was both accidental and thoughtful. After spotting a scammer on Telegram posing as Azalea to launch a memecoin, she was forced to take action. “If this guy says he’ll flip my coin in 24 hours, I’ll flip mine in 23 hours,” she said.

But he has been watching cryptocurrencies from the sidelines since 2020. Looking at non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and Web3 art projects come and go, she knew there was something for her in the industry, but she wasn’t sure what. Memecoins seemed like a trend fueled by a language she can speak.

“I’m someone who has naturally had so many memes throughout my career; things go viral on purpose or accidentally. I felt like it was a space that I could really interact with successfully,” she said.

Considered the currency of micro-trends, memecoins themselves have become the force behind the most recent cryptocurrency renaissance, likely usurping the role NFTs played during the previous bull market. According to data from CoinGecko, the value of the popular Pepe ($PEPE) and Shiba Inu ($SHIB) have increased by 363% and 201% respectively over the past year. Some of this year’s craziest hits? Jeo Boden, Doland Tremp, MAGA Hat, Elawn Moosk and even Good Gensler, trolling SEC Chairman Gary Gensler.

Economic nihilism?

Omid Malekan, an adjunct professor at Columbia Business School, told Fortune that he sees memecoins as “definitive proof” that blockchain technology is the financial infrastructure for the digital age. “Where else could celebrities put out an asset to fans without having to go through a gatekeeper and reach so many people?” he says.

However, like all forms of democratization, it is a corner of cryptocurrencies that is often riddled with scams. Issuers can deposit large sums to themselves, promote the coin to send the price soaring, and then pull the rug out.

“These celebrity-backed coins are scams and will go to zero pretty quickly. While anyone should be able to use any platform, these coins omit material information, are misleading, and often violate securities laws,” Terrence Yang, CEO of Swan, told Fortune.

But Azalea insists she’s not a carpetbagger. She says she wants to find long-term utility for the coin and she thinks the celebrity buzz offers a way for the retail sector to engage with her Solana. The two startups she co-founded—a contract-free phone data provider and a gifting and crowdfunding site—will allow customers to pay with Mother Iggy coins. But her ultimate goal is to turn Mother Iggy into a stablecoin. “She would be like the Holy Grail,” she says.

But not all memecoin projects have proved successful, suggesting that a large online following does not guarantee investors. Caitlyn Jenner ($JENNER) also hit out at Solana last week. However, it has remained in Azalea’s shadow, reaching a market capitalization of less than $10 million, with growth of only 7% in the last week.

In the field of memecoin critical theory, Azalea offers two pillars of success. One is a willingness to engage with the crypto community they are in. In his case, this involved creating a Telegram channel within a few days of trading. The second is playfulness, based on Azalea’s provocative memes, and the exploitation of cryptocurrency trolling culture.

So instead of memecoins becoming a common tool in a celebrity’s arsenal, Azalea predicts there will only be a handful of people able to find the right tone and monetize.

Another obstacle celebrities may face is regulation. Malekan argues that, unlike Bitcoin or Ether, memecoins should be legally treated like gambling, “otherwise it will be very easy for celebrities to abuse their namecoin and treat it like a money grab,” he adds. He wants issuers to be transparent about how much they have retained and the high likelihood of volatility.

But ultimately sees the growth of memecoins, meme stocksand gambling as indicators of economic nihilism: “People feel they have to do risky things with their money to get ahead.”

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