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Iggy Azalea’s MOTHER Meme Coin Turned $3,000 Into $9 Million For 1 Lucky Crypto Trader
Rapper Iggy Azalea’s MOTHER token hit another all-time high on Thursday, extending gains for Solana’s latest meme coin and inviting criticism of the highly risky, sometimes infamous sub-sector of celebrity cryptocurrencies.
Just over a week after launch, the MOTHER token has reached a market capitalization of $200 million, minting millionaires among some iron-handed gamblers who have seen price increases of 90% in the last 24 hours alone . Azalea turned her powerful X (formerly Twitter) account into a platform to promote the token to her 8 million followers.
These eye-watering totals have put MOTHER at the top of Solana’s fast-growing meme coin sector. Nowadays anyone can, in minutes, create a token that mocks anything. Here, the someone is Australian rapper Iggy Azalea, and the something is, well, a photo of his backside.
MOTHER is the second largest asset by market capitalization to emerge from the meme coin factory Pump.Funthe outpost partially responsible for the flooding Solana with half a million new tokens as recently as May, according to The Block. Gamblers who bought the MOTHER Pump.Fun and held back they are sitting on a huge windfall. THE upper wallet on May 28, he held approximately $3,200 in tokens; as of Thursday morning his position was worth nearly $9 million.
Like many meme coins, MOTHER claims no value proposition. Owners do not receive compensation from album sales, like some Royalty-soaked NFTs Do. They also don’t have the right to vote like some fan tokens issued by football the teams bring. MOTHER’s value is purely a function of demand for a coin that some speculators bet could rise further.
All that froth has renewed scrutiny over so-called celebrity tokens.
Ethereum founder on Wednesday Vitalik Buterin explodes celebrity tokens that tout “financialization as a means to an end” and lack a greater purpose. Hours later, Azalea subtweeted him with a Photoshopped image of her breastfeeding a newborn Buterin. “He was just angry,” he wrote, using slang for hunger-induced irritability.
This brazen part sparked further criticism from the philosophical corner of cryptocurrencies. Hayden Adams, creator of the decentralized trading protocol Uniswap and pioneer of the token trading technology behind the on-chain trading of meme coins and pretty much everything else, chastised Azalea for criticizing “the best builder in the entire space” while not he was able to leverage his foray into the cryptocurrency industry for some higher purpose.
What started as a million-dollar joke has since turned into a debate over the meaning of cryptocurrencies themselves.
Early Thursday morning, Evgeny Gaevoy, head of the market, Wintermute, played it down The efforts of Adams and Buterin to “solve capitalism”. “I don’t know guys, I agree with Iggy on this one🙃,” he has published on X.
However, MOTHER still has a long way to go before moving up to the big leagues of meme coins. Blockgraze, a pseudonymous cryptocurrency trader who turned $1,500 into millions of dollars betting early on Dogwifhat (WIF), he 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, there are all the mistakes and additional risks that come with attaching yourself to her personally. She can get bored, tweet the wrong thing, face personal lawsuits, or whatever,” he said Blockgraze.
Azalea’s rise as the poster boy for the Bull is helping support MOTHER’s price in a way that few other celebrities have been able to achieve. His posts on She also changed her profile photo to an NFT of Mad Lads, Solana’s most prized collectible.
“The Iggy coin itself is really interesting because it seems like it’s trying to hold its own and so far the price reflects people’s appreciation,” Blockgraze said.
Celebrities have a mostly infamous history of promoting cryptocurrencies. There’s the flashy Larry David one FTX Super Bowl Commercial, which gave rise to lawsuits from customers of the failed and fraudulent exchange. Former boxer Floyd Mayweather has landed hot water twice as much as scam promotions. And Kim Kardashian coped SEC sanctions to boost a token.
MOTHER differs from these in many respects, not least its proximity to the source. Although it is unclear whether Azalea herself created the token Pump.Fun, it is technically plausible that he did so. Regardless, he has been promoting the resource since its earliest moments.
The token is the so-called “developer portfolio“(Pump.Fun labels token creators’ wallets as “developers” despite not needing technical expertise to create a token) held nearly $5 million in MOTHER on Thursday.
Azalea was not immediately available for an interview Thursday. In a send on X at the end of May he explained some of his reasoning: