Kanye West Shakes Up Crypto With YZY Coin’s Wild First Day

Ye (Kanye West) debuted a crypto memecoin Thursday, August 21st, that debuted at $0.34 and quickly gained momentum, reaching $3 billion in market cap with a 6,800% surge in price, before eventually crashing.

A video was posted to his X account, confirming the launch. In the video, which appeared to be AI generated, an image of him stated, “The official Yeezy token just dropped.”, pronouncing the word “the” like “thee”.

The description of the coin, according to his website, is: “YZY Money is a concept to put you in control, free from centralized authority.”


The token structure of his memecoin mirrors another popular memecoin from earlier this year, with 70% allocated to Ye, 10% to liquidity, and 20% to sale. It has a maximum supply of 1 billion coins, with 299.99 million circulating currently, as of 11:00P EST 8/21/25.

Investors who bought the token early and sold before the plunge reaped high profits. One investor bought $2.28 million worth of the coin and received $6 million in profit. Another wallet showed a 450,611 USDC purchase of the coin at $0.35, and later sold part of their holdings at $1.39, reaping $1.5 million in profit. Others who bought when the coin was high experienced great losses, with one wallet purchasing $500,000 worth of YZY Money token at $1.56 and selling at $1.06.

Although the coin “crashed”, it has the possibility of quickly increasing in value again in the future, as Ye also announced his payment processor, Ye Pay, which is accepted on his website, and corresponding YZY card, which his website says can be used to spend YZY and USDC “at millions of merchants worldwide”.

However, high volatility exists with any crypto investment, and as always, anyone choosing to invest should proceed with extreme caution.

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About the author

KeyIce is an entrepreneur, BMI songwriter, and music enthusiast, who is head of the playlist curation team and a writer for HomeBase Radio's "New Music Blog". As CEO of HomeBase Promotions, she has been in the entertainment industry for over 15 years.

A graduate of UTSA who majored in Information Systems with a Computer Science minor, she enjoys combining her technical skills with her love of music to create niche grassroots online marketing concepts for urban entertainment professionals and related projects, that are designed to keep up with trends in technology.

Among her accomplishments in achieving this is the design of Hip Hop EPK, which hosts a custom script that she wrote to search for and display hip hop press kits.

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