Will Copyright Infringement Drive Crypto Adoption?

Last week, the memecoin $CHILLGUY blew up.

It’s been a TikTok darling with many “retail investors” new to crypto buying in — standing at a whopping 125,003 holders right now.

Everything seemed primed to take it to $1B plus and a Binance listing: it had a viral meme that every brand was tweeting about, it had a ton of existing content that people were familiar with but still found fresh, and it played right into the “TikTok meta” that people were talking about.

It got all the way to a $560M market cap — then the illustrator put out this tweet:

The coin cratered by 50% over the course of 2 hours because a non-endorsement/threat of legal notice reduces chances at a CEX listing.

But then people realised that well, you can’t sue a blockchain or decentralized system.

It’s honestly very understandable — as a creator/artist, seeing their character used in this way kind of sucks. Even if a “donations wallet” could net 7-8 figures (the one for Phillip Banks got ~$1.3M in a few hours), there are repercussions to this type of endorsement when anyone who’s down from their “investment” will inevitably come knocking on his door (figuratively).

It’s not just Phillip Banks (Chill Guy illustrator). Famously, Matt Furie (creator of Pepe the Frog who has issued Pepe NFTs before!) did not endorse $PEPE, although that hasn’t stopped the meme from being listed everywhere and becoming a $8.5B market cap coin (#19 by market cap which is just absurd).

Other “creators” unhappy with memecoins are launching their own tokens, notably the owner of $PNUT (dead squirrel).

On the flip side, you have artists like Mark Kacy embracing their memecoins and getting a lot of love and support as a result. How sustainable it is is a different story.

For artists, there might not be a lot of good options or solutions to tackle this type of issue: while endorsing/issuing an “official” coin may not be exactly what they want to do, it may be the lesser of two evils since… you know the internet is going to do what it wants to, anyways.

It’s a bit idealistic to think that you can have your cake and eat it too — if you want the internet to blow up your character and give you fame and glory, but you won’t deal with all the scams, IP infringement and scalpers trying to ride on the attention.

It’s not limited to memecoins either: stuff like creating Chill Guy t-shirt designs to sell would be another way to monetize someone else’s IP, albeit perhaps less lucrative.

At the end of the day: the blockchain enables us to tokenized culture, and the only way that these crypto degens aren’t going to launch a PumpFun on your illustrations is when you officially embrace the culture and launch one as a defensive measure.

If you liked that content, please subscribe to this newsletter & follow me on Twitter! I also have a non-alpha group where I share what I’m looking at (no shills).

Until next time.