For a while it seemed like celebrity involvement in crypto was limited to just the greedy cash grabbing celebrities or those who knew nothing about crypto but put their name behind anything with money in it. From NFTs to tokens celebrity endeavors into our space of crypto have been a day or two push then the celebrity bounces as though it never happened. Then came the celebrity memecoin craze a couple of months ago. A prolific serial scammer named Sahil convinced a bunch of celebrities to let him run tokens. All of them he later rugged by selling a bunch of supply. Most celebrities gave up after the Sahil scam. But two of them didn’t. Enter Lil Pump and Iggy Azalea.
The Lil Pump and Mother (Iggys) tokens were rugged by Sahil. But they did something different than everyone else. They didn’t bounce. Instead they became even more immersed in the degen world of memecoins. They started showing up at random Twitter spaces. Started asking questions. Lil Pump can be seen on Twitter losing money in the trenches on random memecoins with everyone else and even recently attended Bitcoin Nashville. He also regularly holds voice chats in his Telegram where he shows up and chats even if its just 20 other peope in there. Iggy constantly posts on Twitter. She also leaves voice notes constantly for her community in Telegram. Neither celebrity is leaving their tokens whether up or down. Nor are they leaving the culture they just get more and more immersed.
This is how celebrity ventures should go. Last bull run I wondered with the celebrity NFT craze why they all rugged their projects when sticking around would have resulted in a strong collection and royalties every day. But they took the quick money and ran. And while both Lil Pump and Iggys tokens are struggling at the moment so is the market. They realize it’s not over. A thousand dollars in Shiba Inu at launch was worth $1.96 for several months. But they kept pushing and now that same thousand dollars at launch would be worth approximately $20 million. Pump and Iggy seem to understand this whereas nobody else does.
That doesn’t mean they haven’t had slip ups along the way. But they’ve learned from them and listened to community feedback. For instance Lil Pump had a Bark Media tag on his profile. But after the Money Glitch CTO pointed out that Bark and Books who run the company had scammed on a presale he had it quickly removed. In another incident he posted a message of support to Zack Morris or Edward Constantinescu who’s case for a pump and dump stock fraud scheme resulting in $114 million in losses to those who tryst3f him is currently on appeal. His token was also called out for bundling over 40% of the supply and in multiple instances selling it. The call outs were from Binance itself here and here. But the message of support was quickly deleted when over a dozen people let him know it was a scam. So he’s learning just like anyone in memecoins has to but that’s part of getting immersed in the culture. We all make mistakes. He’s showing he can take feedback.
Lil Pump and Iggy Azalea are setting a new standard for what celebrity involvement can and should look like in decentralized markets like Solana. Probably the only thing they haven’t done is team up with a large scale artist like Beeple or NFT Demon to launch a NFT collection that they push with their token with the same consistency as they have the token. That would make them the first not only to see it through in the memecoin market but the NFT market as well, a vital part of the Solana ecosystem. Will they stay consistent? If so the only direction long term is up. Will they venture into other parts of the Solana ecosystem like NFTs? Only time will tell. But two months later one thing is for sure. They are changing the game of celebrity memecoins and showing how it should be done which runs counter to the many celebrities that came before them. Lets hope the ones after take notice.