YZY Hype Machine Leaves Merchants Nursing Hundreds of thousands in Losses on Kanye West-Linked Token

Shopping for the YZY token apparently linked to Ye, the rapper previously often known as Kanye West, resulted in tears for greater than 70,000 wallets, Bubblemaps, a blockchain knowledge visualization instrument, mentioned in a publish on X.

The Solana-based memecoin’s debut final week was a part of a “YZY Cash” ecosystem plan, which included cost rails and a branded card.

On-chain knowledge, nonetheless, means that insider and early wallets, mixed with skinny liquidity and speedy hypothesis, resulted in a launch the place whales extracted tens of millions, whereas the group shouldered almost the entire losses.

Greater than 51,800 addresses seem to have misplaced between $1 and $1,000, one other 5,269 are down $1,000 to $10,000, and 1,025 wallets shed $10,000 to $100,000, based on Bubblemaps’ knowledge.

On the high of the loss curve, 108 wallets are sitting on six-figure drawdowns, whereas three merchants misplaced greater than $1 million every.

On the opposite facet of the calculation, 11 addresses booked revenue of $1 million or extra, simply 0.015% of the entire. An estimated 99 wallets generated over $100,000, whereas 2,541 wallets cleared no less than $1,000.

The gang as a complete is down some $8.2 million, regardless of some insiders pocketing substantial wins. So whereas 18,000 wallets technically profited, the focus was brutal. The true cash sat with the highest 11, whereas the remaining barely moved the needle.

The lopsided distribution displays the structural flaws flagged from day one, as CoinDesk famous in its earlier story.

A full 70% of the provision was earmarked for Yeezy Investments LLC, locked underneath Jupiter’s vesting system, with solely 20% offered to the general public and 10% used for liquidity.

The pool itself was seeded with YZY tokens alone and not using a stablecoin pair — a design that leaves the door open to sudden liquidity pulls, not not like the short-lived LIBRA token promoted in Argentina in February.

On-chain analysts recognized wallets with early entry. On the time of the issuance, handle 6MNWV8 spent 450,611 USDC for 1.29 million YZY at $0.35, flipped 1.04 million tokens for 1.39 million USDC, and nonetheless holds roughly 249,907 YZY price about $600,000 to make a fast $1.5 million revenue.

As of Thursday, YZY’s market cap has deflated to $544.9 million with $42.7 million in liquidity and 26,590 holders, down sharply from the preliminary frenzy that briefly noticed valuations touted as excessive as $3 billion.

Day by day quantity has slumped to $1.8 million, DEXTools knowledge reveals, a fraction of early exercise.

YZY’s efficiency intently mirrors that of many celebrity-based memecoins, the place the possibility of hitting life-changing beneficial properties is successfully zero except you had been already in on the within.

CoinDesk has contacted Ye by e mail for remark.