American rapper and entrepreneur Kanye West, known as Ye, who has recently been openly calling himself a Nazi, is planning to launch his own YZY token. The crypto coin will be created so that Ye can bypass traditional platforms such as Shopify, which have stopped cooperating with him because of his hateful statements.
According to rumors, 70% of YZY tokens will be reserved for Kanye West personally, another 10% will be used to maintain liquidity, and 20% will be distributed among investors.
Ye’s decision to enter the crypto market is connected to a series of public scandals that have undermined his business empire. In 2022 Adidas, Balenciaga, and his agency stopped working with him after anti-Semitic statements. West praised Hitler on the air and published provocative statements on X (formerly Twitter).
The situation escalated this year when Ye called himself a Nazi on X and posted a swastika T-shirt on the Yeezy website. In response, Shopify blocked his online store. Ye was also blocked on X again, but his account is currently functioning perfectly well and he continues to post Nazi-themed posts.
YZY tokens will be the official currency of Yeezy, which will be accepted as a means of payment on the website.
Initially, it was planned that YZY sales would start on the Yeezy website on Thursday, but the launch was postponed to Friday. One of the project team members explained this by saying that the team was taking into account the timing after the recent the scandal around the LIBRA token, which was promoted by Argentine President Javier Milei.
Rumors of Kanye West’s token launch have been circulating since the beginning of the month, when the rapper said he had been in contact with Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong. Later, Ye wrote on social media that he had no plans to launch a cryptocurrency because «coins are parasitizing fans because of the» hype.
However, the success of the TRUMP memecoin is not lost on him. Interestingly, 80% of TRUMP is owned by CIC Digital, a company associated with Donald Trump. And at first, Ye also wanted to get 80% of the tokens, but eventually agreed to 70%.
If YZY repeats at least part of TRUMP’s success, Ye’s personal profit could reach tens of millions of dollars.
Source: CoinDesk