Hong Kong – Yes, the artist formerly known as Kanye West who has repeatedly called a “Nazi” in recent weeks, plans to launch a cryptographic token, according to three sources close to the project.
The token, Yzy, is designed to help the side platforms like Shopify that cut links with him in response to his hateful rhetoric.
The crypto, with its philosophy resistant to censorship, offers you an alternative alternative to cash its celebrity status: seventy percent of the Yzy token, named after the Yeezy Clothing brand, will be reserved personally, with only 10% allocated For Liquidity Provisioning and 20% for investors.
Ye’s foray into the crypto comes in the years of public controversy that have set out its commercial empire. In 2022, you were abandoned by Adidas, Balenciaga and its talent agency after having made a series of anti -Semitic comments, in particular by renting Adolf Hitler in a live interview and tweeted inflammatory rhetoric on Jewish and other groups.
The fallout continued this year when you, after having called Nazi again on X, listed a t-shirt bearing a swastika on the Yeezy website, leading the Shopify’s electronic commerce platform to close your store online.
Yzy is wrapped as an official Yeezy currency and will be accepted as payment on her website.
Coindesk learned the token through an email from Hussein Lalani, a person with an e-mail address Yeezy.com who identified as the financial director of Yeezy. After sending a document describing the unsolicited token, Lalani asked Coindesk to hang on to the publication and accept a “embargo”. Coindesk did not accept the embargo and three sources close to the project authenticated the document.
Lalani did not respond to other requests for comments.
The Yzy token was initially to be sold on the Yeezy website on Thursday at 6:00 p.m., but the launch was delayed on Friday, according to a member of the team who asked not to be identified for fear of associating publicly to the project.
Follow Trump
There have been murmurs of a potential Ye token since earlier this month, after the rapper has teased that he had tried to contact the CEO of Coinbase, Brian Armstrong.
You later displayed that he “did not make a room” despite someone who offered him $ 2 million to do so. He added: “The coins prey fans with media threw.”
Sources close to the Yzy team told Coindesk that you aimed to imitate the room even Trump by Donald Trump, which the president launched two days before his second inauguration. Trump has raised eyebrows for its ownership distribution of similar initiates: 80% of Trump is currently held by CIC Digital, a company linked to the president.
You too wanted an 80%participation, but you were negotiated at 70%, an additional source close to the project that asked not to be identified said in Coindesk. If the Ye’s token even reached a fraction of Trump’s success, its participation could still be worth several million dollars.
‘The Milei Thing’
Yzy between an already saturated market of Crypto projects focused on celebrities, many of which have been accused of exploiting fidelity of fans without offering tangible utility. In many cases, these tokens see a short -term price increase led by the media threw before crashing, letting retail investors have the bag.
The allocation of the centralized property only adds the risk of sudden drop in prices. According to the unlined press release, YE’s participation at 70% of YE is structured thanks to a acquisition calendar in several phases – certain parts are locked up to 12 months, which means that they cannot be Sold until then – although criticism argues that such heavy initiating attributions still provides the founders in relation to retail investors.
This week, Argentina has become tangled in a political crisis after a meme piece approved by President Javier Milei, Balance, turned out to be a program “pump-and-dump”, triggering the indignation of the public and calls for dismissal.
The source close to Yzy told Coindesk that the lag of the token occurs when her team thought if she was still “too close to Milei’s thing”.