Amidst Kanye West’s recent public implosions and subsequent rejection from several major platforms, including bans from Twitter, Instagram and a severed relationship with JP Morgan Chase, there’s at least one community still willing to be optimistic about West: crypto fans.
On Sunday, an unknown founder launched YZY token, a coin branded with an illustration of the rapper’s face, on the Ethereum blockchain and has been drumming up enthusiasm on the messaging app Telegram, where users have been encouraged to buy the coin and spread the news about it to boost its value.
Upstart coins like this get launched all the time in the chaotic crypto space, oftentimes with catastrophic results—the value of MAGA-boosted “Let’s Go Brandon” ETH coins dropped in value by 99.5% in a month earlier this year—but YZY backers are particularly excited about West’s breakup with official banking institution JP Morgan, which they feel makes his official endorsement of the alternative crypto space inevitable.
ADVERTISEMENT
“JP Morgan has blocked Kanye from their bank, whilst he had over 150m USD with them,” user FuzzyPunk posted in the YZY Coin Telegram chat. “He publicly announced his disgust on some interviews and podcasts, which has led him to be publicly preaching about decentralization.”
“WE hold the floor and we know that if/when Kanye tweets about crypto, chances are more than likely that it will be Yeezy related, seeing as he just changed his Yeezy company brand officially to ‘YZY,’” FuzzyPunk continued. “It’s only a matter of time before he publicly promotes crypto, and $YZY will be here with open arms.”
YZY coin supporters are also excited that West was spotted this weekend wearing a Satoshi Nakamoto hat: Nakamoto is the founder of Bitcoin.
In 2020, West said on the Joe Rogan podcast that “geniuses” in the bitcoin and cryptocurrency communities “really have a perspective on what the true liberation of America and humanity will be.”
Things escalated on Monday with the news that West has agreed to buy Parler, a social media platform heavily associated with far right rhetoric, conspiracy theories and MAGA diehards: Parler launched an NFT marketplace in March in an effort to attract crypto-enthusiasts with an inaugural “Official CryptoTrump Club” NFT collection. “Now you need your own money @kanyewest,” @yzy_token tweeted alongside a TMZ link to the Parler news.
YZY Coin has its skeptics: “some mfs gonna lose a lot of money,” one member of the official r/Kanye subreddit observed.
“This token has a $40k market cap, which is super low,” Duncan Cock Foster, the co-founder of NFT auction platform Nifty Gateway, told The Daily Beast on Monday. “Buying this token is a gamble because it’s so new and the founders are unknown. There is a chance that this token is a scam token, which is also common with low market cap tokens. I wouldn’t recommend buying it unless you’re prepared to possibly lose all of your money.”
Even West’s most passionate acolytes have been finding it increasingly difficult to justify supporting him in recent weeks. West’s defense of his “White Lives Matter” shirts at fashion week, his antisemitic tweeted statement that “when I wake up I'm going death con 3 on Jewish people” and his claims that “professional actors” and “fake children” were planted in his home to “sexualize [his] kids” are just a few of the soundbites causing fans to despair.
While it may be holdout diehard fans behind YZY coin, Cock Foster doesn’t think so. “These folks are probably just trying to make money and don’t actually care about Kanye.”
“If I had to guess, I’d say this token will be gone in a few weeks,” Cock Foster added. “Even in the time since we started talking, the market cap has now fallen in half: it’s at $23k.”
