Propose an edit: Kanye West

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Title Category One sentence summary Infobox, one "key: value" per line Article body, markdown, use [[wiki links]] and end with a ## References section

Kanye West, also known as Ye, is an American musician and designer whose August 2025 launch of the YZY token on [[Solana]] was the biggest celebrity coin event after the [[trump coin launch]], and one of the fastest collapses. In trench history, YZY marks the moment the [[celebrity coin wave]] returned at maximum scale and confirmed every structural lesson of the [[hawk tuah coin]] era at a hundred times the size.

## Before the launch

West's name circulated in coin speculation long before he launched. In February 2025 his Instagram account promoted a purported YZY token that his camp disavowed, with West denying involvement in what coverage described as a hack, and he publicly discussed having been approached about paid scam coin promotions. The episodes primed the market to treat any Ye adjacent contract address as either the real launch or the exit scam pretending to be it.

## YZY

On August 21, 2025, West posted a contract address to his tens of millions of followers and declared that Yeezy Money had arrived, framing YZY as a new economy built on chain with an associated payments ambition. CoinDesk reported insiders cashing in millions as the token spiked; the price surged nearly 6,800 percent, briefly valuing the token near 3 billion dollars within roughly an hour, before it lost about 74 percent within the first day and around 90 percent from peak shortly after, falling toward a 320 million dollar capitalization.

## Concentration and losses

Analyses published in the days after the launch alleged extreme insider control. Coinbase director Conor Grogan wrote that about 94 percent of supply was initially insider controlled, with a single multisig holding 87 percent before distribution, and traced one wallet that turned roughly 450,000 USDC into more than 1.5 million dollars of profit within the launch window. The analytics firm [[bubblemaps]] reported that 51,862 of 70,201 participating wallets lost money, for total losses near 74.8 million dollars, while 11 wallets each cleared more than 1 million dollars; it separately alleged that [[hayden davis]] coordinated a [[sniper]] operation netting about 12 million dollars across 14 connected wallets. These are analysts' allegations from on chain data; West and the YZY team did not confirm them, and CCN's coverage cataloged the launch's red flags while noting no finding of wrongdoing by any court.

## Significance

YZY compressed the entire celebrity coin playbook into 24 hours: maximal reach, maximal concentration, and a loss distribution in which tens of thousands of small wallets funded a handful of insiders. Within [[the trenches]] it is cited as the proof that scale does not fix the model, and its wallet loss chart became one of the most shared images of the 2025 cycle.

## References

- https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2025/08/21/insiders-cash-in-millions-as-ye-formerly-kanye-west-apparently-issues-yzy-token
- https://www.theblock.co/post/368557/kanye-west-yzy-11-netted-millions
- https://sherwood.news/crypto/kanye-west-launched-a-solana-based-meme-coin-that-soared-before-tanking/
- https://www.ccn.com/news/crypto/kanye-west-3b-memecoin-yzy-solana-celebrity-rugpull/
- https://news.bitcoin.com/kanye-wests-yzy-meme-coin-crashes-hours-after-3b-launch-amid-insider-manipulation-claims/
- https://cryptoslate.com/hayden-davis-allegedly-sniped-kanye-wests-yzy-token-to-make-12-million-in-profits/

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