Background

Let’s face it, long before the recent meme mania, celebrities or famous individuals were fascinated by crypto, with their interest pre-dating the current cycle.

In the previous cycle, it wasn't just crypto ICOs that caught their eye, as was the case with Floyd Mayweather, Paris Hilton, and Jamie Fox in 2017. Rather, non-fungible Tokens (NFTs) attracted a good chunk of celebrity attention as well.

These unique digital assets became the must-have for stars and influencers, marking a trend that saw some of them rock NFTs on their social media profiles, print them on merchandise, include them in their lyrics, and even hop on podcasts to speak of their genius for owning a piece of what they thought to be the most revolutionary tech at the time.

In fact, if you were here for the previous bull run, you’d be able to remember a few of these celebrities… Jay Z purchased a cryptopunk that he still rocks as his PFP.

Likewise, Snoop Dog, Justin Bieber, Steve Aoki, Logan Paul, Neymar, and many other superstars across several fields all bought NFTs at the middle or top of the peak bull.

This era of celebrity interest can be seen as a time of genuine curiosity and a willingness to take risks. However, for many of these celebrities, their ventures likely ended in disappointment.

Recent data shows that interest in NFTs has plummeted by 82% in early 2024, with their value dropping over 90% since 2021.

On the other hand, non-celebrities or ordinary folks who were more versed in the semantics of the crypto markets did not only play around with NFTs, flipping them for profit, but were also immersed in memecoins.

The bear that came after eventually washed away any form of celebrity interest in crypto, and aside from some (celebrities) who were rich enough to afford fund managers who plunged their money into a few seed rounds here and there, there was no form of identifiably direct meddling with any aspect of crypto by these folks!

In fact, crypto was back in the court of the “nerds” and ordinary folk who mostly had no other option than to “believe in something.”

Well, until “Pepe”.

Bye NFTs, hi memecoins (The second meme cycle)

While there will be far more interesting and detailed storytelling about the events that heralded the most recent bear market, one of the most important occurrences was the great BTC sell-off on May 19th, 2021. This marked the grim start of a bear market that lasted nearly two years.

Many factors can be mentioned to explain the reason behind such a painful sell-off, such as a change in institutional demand for Bitcoin, spending behavior on old and new coins, the Terra Luna crash, and dwindling faith in the crypto ecosystem.

However, what matters most in today's discussion is that the previous bear market led to a gradual decline in the value of NFTs.

This situation sparked a renewed mindset among seasoned crypto players, who began to look towards familiar strategies to navigate and rise out of the downturn. This ultimately led to the second memecoin cycle right amid one of the most painful bear markets of all time.

The above preludes the famous Pepe memecoin, born at the bottom of the bear market. Pepe’s astounding 450,000% upside within the first four days of its launch on Ethereum gave birth to the second memecoin cycle.

The story of a trader who turned a $251 buy of the Pepe meme into millions of dollars encouraged a reformed “gonna make it” mentality amongst locked-in crypto enthusiasts.

Pepe’s success became as viral as possible and kickedstart a fresh memecoin cycle.

However, as is requisite with the burst of attention on meme coins, what came next was a proliferation of meme coin launches and, right after, waning attention on new memecoins, finally leading to a more settled meme coin market devoid of the preceding euphoria.

Still, this cycle failed to attract as much celebrity attention as possible. They remained averse to crypto, some selling their NFTs for huge losses and others holding little to no interest in anything crypto whatsoever.

Well, until a dog ‘wif’ a hat arrived on the scene.

Exit bear market, welcome bull market-Wif-hat the third memecoin cycle)

The sun was finally out, and the bear market was losing its grip. Despite tales of war in the Middle East, Elizabeth Warren’s relentless crusade against the crypto industry, and the antics of bald Gary Gensler, the orange coin was soaring back to its all-time high, and the rest of the market was healing.

However, Bitcoin wasn’t at the center of attention this time—Solana was. The Solana ecosystem had taken the hardest hit during the bear market, plummeting to $8 from an all-time high of $259.96.

Throughout most of the bear market, various crypto players had written Solana off, pointing to the crash of FTX, the imprisonment of Sam Bankman-Fried, and the lack of significant DeFi applications on the chain as signs of its demise.

But Toly and the rest of the guys at Solana were focused on repositioning the network with an approach that even the blind could see.

Solana was going to position as an underdog, the retail chain, quite anti-Ethereum, with a heavy focus on usability and linear scaling, all while supporting ...take a guess… Memecoin activity on the chain.

Within this framework, memecoin growth began to accelerate on Solana with strong support from the leaders, thought leaders, and influencers in the Solana ecosystem.

Solana’s growing memecoin activity began to draw significant attention to the chain so much that Solana apps overtook the network chain metric leaderboard in various areas. For example:

• Slerfsol, a memecoin surpassing Ethereum DEXs in trading volume

• Solana bot, Trojan, and quick-token launch app Pump.fun surpassing Uniswap in weekly revenue

Solana memecoin cycle: Celebrity invasion

Memecoins such as Bonk, Dogwifhat ($WIF), book of meme ($BOME), Mew, and Popcat led and continue to lead the current Solana memecoin cycle. However, they’re all leaders of their own meta within the cycle.

For example, pet or animal meta had the “Dog” meta with a proliferation of various dog-themed memecoins, some of which were designed after the pet dogs of actual leaders in the crypto space and, later on, celebrities.

In the Dog meta, the dogwifhat memecoin can be considered the market leader, while in the cat meta, Popcat and Mew stand out.

The crux of the trend was mainly to latch on to the pets of quite famous people who sometimes ended up referencing the names of their pets across their social media accounts.

The Solana memecoin animal or pet meta eventually transitioned into the “famous person” trend, initially featuring comically misspelled names of famous politicians such as Joe Biden with the “Jeo Boden”.

There was also “Doland Tremp”, and even Elizabeth Warren, Barrack Obama, and Michelle Obama all having their fair share of memecoin satire.

The legend of Sahil Arora

The foregoing, in tandem with the rise of Pump.fun—an innovative platform that allows anyone to launch a tradable coin with zero to no technical experience for as low as $2—and the consequent sporadic memecoin launches undoubtedly gave rise to the “celeb meta.”

Celebrities themselves tweeted Solana contract addresses of their own memecoins named after their alias or any form of nomenclature associated with their brand.

While some of these celebrities admitted to being in charge of the launches themselves, others alluded to a notorious figure behind them—a celebrity memecoin promoter or alleged crypto scammer named Sahil Arora.

One notable case involving Sahil's alleged social engineering tactics was the launch of "$Jenner," a celebrity memecoin linked to Caitlyn Jenner.

Sahil’s supposed strategy was both cunning and deceptive. He is accused of tricking celebrities' teams into letting him handle their memecoin launches, gaining access to the token supply.

Once he had control, he'd persuade the celebrity to tweet about the memecoin, creating hype and driving up its value, only to dump the tokens shortly after for a quick profit.

This tweet provides evidence of this operation, with Caitlyn Jenner alluding to being deceived by Sahil.

• Alleged X tweet/post made by Sahil through Caitlyn Jenner’s X account, providing an address and requesting for memecoins

• Onchain proof showing that Sahil dumped the $Jenner token for 100.82 SOL

Caitlyn Jenner alludes to Sahil’s strategy as laid out in the TL: DR provided by X user CryptoRoxo on the $Jenner fiasco involving Caitlyn and Sahil.

Sahil is also alleged to have been the mastermind behind a couple of co-ordinated celebrity memecoin launches such as:

• $ZUMI, a memecoin associated with a model named Kazumi
• $Rich, a memecoin associated with hip hop rapper, Rickthekid
• $Doll, a memecoin associated with Ivanaknolldoll
• $Soulja, a memecoin associated with hip hop rapper and pop artist Soulja Boy

All of these launches can be traced back to Sahil’s address: 7s3v1jP9o1qZgovd4i9QfKej7is4cLV3uSbqKCNZN9rh

More celebrity memecoins

It’s unclear how many celebrities Sahil Arora socially engineered. However, you’ll be mistaken to believe that the famous people were the only ones to launch memecoins in this current Solana memecoin cycle.

We’ve made a list of the most notable celebrities who launched their own memecoins. Most of them, we suspect, partnered with fraudulent teams behind the scenes.

Celebrity memecoin list:

It’s important to mention that the above list might not be exhaustive and more pop off all the time.

There are more famous folks who have been nothing more than vicious in launching their own memecoins, leveraging their stardom or audience to promote, pump, and dump tokens on their unsuspecting followers.

A number of these tokens end up in a downtrend, as can be seen below.

Nonetheless, some of these celebrity memecoins stand out as outliers from the rest—sustaining attention, representing the core of actual memecoin culture, and exhibiting a semblance of celebrity engagement in crypto during the NFT era —genuine curiosity and acknowledgment of the risks.

An example is $Mother by Iggy Azalea. In several now-deleted tweets, she refuted Sahil’s involvement in the token launch, explicitly stating multiple times that she and her team were 100% behind the token.

Iggy’s willingness to back the $Mother token and surprising know-how at making typical crypto Twitter memes and “shitposts” contributed to $Mother soaring over 10x from its all-time low and attracting a significant amount of trading volume.

Beyond token price action, Iggy is also moving forward to provide some utility for the $Mother token, collaborating with Sphere and Unreal mobile to allow token holders to pay nationwide talk, text, and data using the $Mother token.

The scamming celebrities

Unlike Iggy, a couple of the aforementioned celebrities that launched memecoins have been outed for their scamming activity.

This leaves us asking the same question as the Vaneck intern below:

While we’re quite unsure of the financial status of most of these celebrities who have launched memecoins recently, we’re quite sure of the scam activity surrounding most of these celeb memecoins, thanks to the likes of serial crypto investigator ZachXBT.

For perspective, $Rich has been revealed to not be the only memecoin launched by rapper Richthekid. Before the $Rich token, the US-based rapper has been involved with shilling, promoting, and launching shady projects like the one shown below.

Another figure with a similar habit of shilling and promoting scammy projects is Afrobeat superstar Davido.

Prior to the launch of his most recent crypto adventure, the $Davido token, he’d been accused of promoting a fraudulent fintech company, Racksterli, as well as other projects such as Rapdoge and Echoke.

While Davido promoted his token through his tweets, he dumped over $200k worth of supply on his unsuspecting followers.

Another case can be seen with UFC pro fighter Khamzat Chimaev, who launched the $Smash token with his team. The token instant-dumped within the first 24 hours a whopping -94.12%, but it was what led to this dump that we find rather interesting or, should we say, annoying.

Almost 71% of the wallets that held $Smash were insider wallets traced to a specific Ethereum address (0x8ae40d1e89cd7333efe42a35969f0b8548fe54a8), thanks to the fact that they were all funded by this same address.

Buzzing rapper Sexy Redd was not left out. She also announced the launch of her memecoin, $Presi, but unlike her colleague Iggy, there were loads of shady misdeeds associated with Sexy Redd’s memecoin.

Evidence shows that the Missouri-born rapper and her team had launched a different token before $Presi and had sniped 82% of the token to dump on unsuspecting traders.

Not only that, but they also proceeded to launch $Presi and sniped 90% of the supply to dump on her followers.

More and more celebrity memecoins have been launched, with most becoming poorly planned scams. While some celebrities have tried to deny their involvement in the promotional tweets, like 50 Cent, who claimed his account was hacked, others have chosen to remain silent about the allegations.

Celeb memecoins: The sentiments and effects

The advent of the celebrity memecoin mania has led to a discourse on the effects of celebrity involvement in this aspect of crypto.

While some would argue that it’s entirely negative for the crypto ecosystem, a few don’t see a problem with it.

One such figure is Ansem, a popular voice in the crypto community. His role in the rise of the Dogwifhat memecoin, among other activities, earned him significant popularity across Crypto Twitter (CT).

So much that he was now the unofficial go-to individual for celebrities wanting to connect with someone native to the crypto industry. More often than not, these celebrities only reached out to Ansem after they had come under fire for their shady memecoin activities.

Ansem sees celebrities creating memecoins as more positive than negative, particularly when considering mass adoption. His theory is straightforward: the more well-known people use crypto or launch their memecoins, the more the general public becomes aware of crypto. And voilà—mass adoption follows.

While we cannot gauge the sentiment towards Ansem’s stance on celebrity memecoins (we will need Kaito AI to ship expeditiously for us to achieve that), popular alternative reasoning regarding the Solana celebrity memecoin fiasco is that of Vitalik, pioneer of the Ethereum chain, who expressed his dissatisfaction about the current state of memecoin activity, particularly with regard to celebrities launching Memecoins.

Vitalik’s opinion on memecoins having at least some form of worthy value or utility can be seen as quite controversial. In fact, it is a stark contrast to what memecoins are generally perceived to be: non-utility socially relevant tokens that are traded for nothing other than their meme-ability.

On the other hand, when we compare the majority of "celebrity meme coins" to Vitalik's example of an acceptable project, Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis' Stoner Cats, we can see some truth in Vitalik's position.

Another effect of celebrity involvement in Memecoins is that it has further fueled retail involvement in what can be considered crypto's gambling utility and left other substantial innovations begging for mindshare. This has affected interest not just in EVM DeFi but also in Solana DeFi.

In some months where we could see a rise in mindshare for specific memecoins on Solana, there was a decline in the mindshare of utility alt tokens on Solana.

Concluding thoughts

Objectively, it's clear that the overall experience with celebrity memecoins has been terrible, as they have tended to be more exploitative than positively impactful.

At the moment, celebrity memecoins are still quite popular, and traders or degenerates are quite ready to bid on any that hits the market (study sentiment on Sydney Sweeney).

While it's nearly impossible to control the market's insatiable appetite for this trend, it would be worthwhile for the Solana team to get involved in curbing this madness.

They could do this by finding better ways to onboard celebrities or issuing a disclaimer about individuals like Sahil, who might entice unsuspecting celebrities into launching memecoins with shady activities, potentially setting themselves up for future SEC lawsuits.

For the rookie traders invited into the degenerate scene by their favorite superstars, it is true that you can go from rags to riches if you snipe a celebrity memecoin early enough.

Albeit, the field you’re about to get acquainted with is akin to walking barefeet on a lava rock. You can easily get burnt, losing everything, rugged by those you look up to. It’s important to ‘trade’ with caution.