SCENE’s 2024 Story of the Year: The Boom—and Bust—of Celebrity Meme Coins

Celebrities and crypto? Nothing new about that, right? Ever since Brock Pierce—who as a child starred in the Walt Disney movie, The Mighty Ducks—co-founded Blockchain Capital, in 2013, some of the world’s most famous humans, from Donald Trump to Lindsay Lohan, have leaned into crypto to see what was in it for them.

Some celebrities were able to use their glitzy names to pump existing crypto projects, with predictable results. The SEC brought actions in a dozen cases over the past decade, ranging from Kim Kardashian to Floyd Mayweather Jr., who were fined over their promotional activities. Celebs were also among the many people tarnished in the FTX scandal that practically brought down the crypto industry.

So celebrities being a part of crypto—not new. What is new, and became a dominant theme last year, was the advent of the celebrity meme coin. As meme coins replaced NFTs as the degen’s favorite way to gamble, the celebrity meme coin emerged, with nearly a dozen stars launching their own coins in the past year.

These influencers are not just promoting the coins, they’re actually creating coins in their own image, promoting them and, in some cases, trying to find businesses around them. For better—and, far more common, for worse.

Traditional investors often believe that Bitcoin investors have high risk tolerances, but meme coin degens are the real mavericks—shooting it out in the Wild West with tokens that can skyrocket or collapse with a moment’s notice. 

And nowhere is that more evident than on the popular meme coin-launching platform, Pump.fun. 

It was the Olympic decathlete Caitlyn Jenner who kicked off the celebrity meme craze by launching her meme there. Pump.fun, it should be noted, is where people do outrageous things to get attention. One fellow threatened to kill a goldfish unless you bought his meme coin; another threatened to sit on the toilet until his token reached a $50 million market cap (and actually shaved off one eyebrow when it hit $10 million). Some went even further off the deep end, including a dude who set himself on fire.

In May, in this circus environment, Jenner decided to launch her token—posing with Donald Trump, who was then mounting his re-election bid. 

It’s hard to overstate how insane this moment was—in fact, lots of people believed that there was no way this was Jenner. Obviously her X account had been hacked. And then she posted a video with a bizarre Snapchat filter on, leading some observers to believe it was an AI deepfake scam. Even the creator of Pump.fun was initially gobsmacked.

“I was shitting my pants,” pseudonymous Pump.fun co-founder Alon told Decrypt. He said the event was one of the craziest moments in the company’s short but lively history: “We published a tweet about it—that she launched a coin and stuff—and then we were like, ‘Did she even launch a coin?’ I was wondering what was going on. It was so weird.”

It turns out that Jenner’s stunt had been enabled by crypto promoter Sahil Arora, who had signed a contract with Jenner promising to launch the token. According to the contract shared by Arora and reviewed by Decrypt, he agreed to pay the “talent”—Jenner— $50,000 upfront and to provide her 80% of all generated revenue. 

It may have been the real deal at the start, but Jenner almost immediately cried foul, claiming  that Arora didn’t uphold his side of the bargain.

“FUCK SAHIL,” Jenner tweeted at a Decrypt reporter, who had asked about Arora. “He SCAMMED us.” Jenner told Decrypt in May that Arora had gone “radio silent after showing a couple of wire transfers” and that the crypto promoter still owed her “lots of money.” Arora did not respond to Decrypt’s request for comment at the time—but that was only the beginning for Sahil.

After launching a Pump.fun token with R&B singer Jason Derulo, who similarly claimed he’d been bamboozled by Arora, the promoter told Decrypt the drama had been “orchestrated.” When asked why Derulo would be calling him out publicly, Arora said it was all “part of the script.”

Arora then went on to launch tokens for rappers Rich the Kid and Lil Pump—all of whom later complained about the experience. Other celebs then followed suit, with rappers Cardi B and Waka Flocka Flame and singer Sean Kingston also launching their own respective tokens—though without any public involvement from Arora.

Data visualization startup Bubbleworks, who went after Arora in a long X thread, said the promoter made $30 million representing celebrities who launched meme coins this year.

“Many of these tokens were launched with obvious red flags from day one,” Nick Vaiman, co-founder and CEO of Bubblemaps, told Decrypt. He pointed to factors such as “heavily controlled supply, malicious intent, and clear strategies to rug-pull and dump on retail investors.” 

Not all the celebrity meme coin launches ended in tears. The exception was SCENE’S Person of the Year, Australian musician Iggy Azalea. Though her token MOTHER caught heat from Bubblemaps because 20% of its supply was sniped at launch, she claimed this was done without her knowledge. That may be true, but as Bubblemaps on-chain sleuths pointed out at the time, the only way a token gets sniped like that is by someone leaking the coin’s contract address to a group of insiders early.

Nevertheless, the tides of perception turned after Azalea held a Twitter Spaces, demonstrated her crypto knowledge, and slammed Arora in the process.

“When we found that she knew what she was doing, we were super bullish on her,” Alon told Decrypt. “It was amazing—a great feeling.”

As the months passed, more celebrities created tokens and abandoned them. Jenner even launched an Ethereum token, causing her origins Solana token to crash in price.

So how are these celebrity meme tokens doing?

At the time of writing, Jenner’s Solana token sits at a market cap of $357,000 while her Ethereum is at just $139,000—a fraction of the $42 million and $7.5 million peak market caps they respectively hit before plunging.

Jason Derulo’s JASON token is down 97.8% from its peak to a market cap of $783,000, Waka Flocka Flame’s FLOCKA is down 99% to $238,000, and the hugely bundled WAP is down a whopping 99.65% to less than $138,000.

“Most celebrities go in here with the worst fucking intentions,” Azalea told Decrypt. “I don’t think a single fucking one of them wants to make a crypto token. I think they think this is something they can extract quick liquidity out of, and then they want to fuck off.”

Needless to say, with these tokens crashing and celebrities abandoning their projects, the first lawsuit has been filed. In November, a group of investors filed a class action lawsuit against Jenner and her manager Sophia Hutchins, accusing her of fraudulently misrepresenting her Solana meme coin and failing to register it as a security.

Jenner’s team did not respond to Decrypt’s request for comment.

Some crypto law experts say get ready for more civil litigation: “We are going to see an uptick in lawsuits involving celebrity-endorsed meme coins,” cyber law attorney Andrew Rossow told Decrypt. “Celebrities will begin to find themselves increasingly accountable not just for their promotional activities, but potentially as ‘sellers’ of these digital assets, opening them up to a wider range of legal repercussions.”

“The Jenner lawsuit serves as a clear warning to any celebrity who believes they can use their fame to overpromise and underdeliver a meme coin launch solely to make a quick buck,” digital assets lawyer Carlo D’Angelo told Decrypt.

Celebrity meme coins have been framed by advocates as being great for onboarding the next generation of crypto traders. Arora, for example, told Decrypt that he kick-started the celebrity meta to make crypto more mainstream than ever.

“For a trend to succeed, it should appeal to a mainstream audience and it should generate at least a small number of winners to sustain hope and inspire others.” Bubblemaps’ Vaiman finished. “Instead, celebrity projects have only extracted liquidity from retail, leaving everyone else as losers.”