Kanye West Launches YZY Meme Coin on Solana, Hits $3B Before it plummeted to $355M (at the time of writing). The announcement was paired Ye Pay, a payment processor, and the YZY Card, a debit solution.
The rapper who is also now legally known as Ye, has officially stepped into crypto.
On Wednesday, the business and music mogul launched YZY, a Solana-based meme coin that briefly touched a $3 billion market cap within hours of its debut before rapidly shedding value.
The launch, billed by Ye himself as the start of “a new economy, built on chain,” comes just months after he publicly dismissed rumours of creating a token.
Blockchain sleuths raised red flags suspicious liquidity pool setups reminiscent of the Libra coin rug pull from earlier in the year.
Community sentiment on the meme coin remains split. Pseudonymous crypto trader Defi Mochi warned that YZY’s fully diluted valuation between $2 and $3 billion was “bad risk-reward” given the fate of other celebrity meme tokens, while also pointing to suspicious timing tied to unfrozen Libra funds.
Meanwhile, CryptoQuant CEO Ki Young Ju drew comparisons to the Official Trump token, which spiked after launch but later collapsed by 88%, suggesting YZY may face a similar trajectory.
Will the price rise?
Data from CoinMarketCap shows YZY hit an all-time high of $3.16 within hours of its introduction before dropping by more than 66% to under $1.00, briefly marking its all-time low at $0.91 the same day.
In the last 24 hours, the meme asset has dropped over 54%, with hourly swings as sharp as 31%. At the time of this writing, its market cap had skydived from its previous multi-billion-dollar peak to sit at around $349 million according to CMC.
Traders have been both long and shorting the token aggressively. Spot On Chain reported one trader on the DEX Hyperliquid managed a $202K gain by shorting the token with leverage, while another repeatedly attempted long positions, racking up more than $159,000 in losses.
