Kanye West YZY memecoin hits $3B

Rapper Ye’s new YZY token on Solana exploded to a roughly $3 billion market cap within 40 minutes of launch before retreating to around $1.05 billion. Ye posted the contract address and unveiled “YZY Money,” calling it an on-chain economy where YZY would act as the currency for transactions. The site’s fine print restricts access in certain jurisdictions and warns that digital assets carry a risk of total loss. Earlier this year, Ye also cautioned that he’d been offered money to promote a fake token by staging a “hacked account” scenario.

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Skepticism grew as on-chain analysts flagged possible insider advantages. The project said it deployed 25 contract addresses and randomly chose one as the official token to deter snipers. Even so, observers noted that liquidity was seeded in a way that allowed the developers to adjust pool liquidity and sell at will. Others highlighted that a large majority of supply appeared concentrated among insiders before distribution, with a single multisig reportedly controlling most tokens at one point.

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Trading around the launch was frenzied. One wallet allegedly bought the wrong token and briefly lost hundreds of thousands of dollars before recovering by switching to the correct contract. Another trader reportedly cleared several million in profit after paying elevated network priority fees to speed execution. Despite the red flags, well-known crypto participants indicated they bought YZY, framing it as a short-term, high-liquidity trade and pointing to other celebrity tokens that surged quickly over brief windows.

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Celebrity-linked coins have delivered uneven outcomes. An endorsement of another token by a prominent political figure earlier this year sent prices soaring before a reversal triggered a sharp drop and a broader backlash. Separately, the TRUMP memecoin launched earlier in the year and saw rapid gains over short periods, underscoring how volatile and narrative-driven this corner of the market remains.

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