Jess Jiang
Appearances
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
Just a quick warning, this episode talks about sex and sex work. It's an economic show, after all.
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
a permit that Mark did not have. The DEC said they'd received several complaints, and based on dozens of extremely popular and frankly quite adorable videos on Peanut's social media page, the officers had determined that both Peanut and a relatively newly acquired raccoon named Fred were somewhere on the premises.
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
Apparently, when you are building a social media empire consisting of both wholesome animal content and bespoke homemade pornography, just like the Ghostbusters warned, it is essential that you never cross the streams. When did you get a sense that OnlyFans might actually be a much more lucrative platform? way of harnessing the attention of the internet?
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
Pretty soon, Mark says, he and his wife were bringing in over $10,000 a month through their OnlyFans page, thanks to this enthusiastic group of Peanuts followers. It was enough money that they started to think about how they might build something bigger and longer-lasting out of these eclectic streams of attention.
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
And that is when they went in on the idea of creating an animal sanctuary. Peanut had been a rescue animal. Mark was like, what better way could there be to turn Peanut's brand into a lasting legacy and source of income?
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The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
They thought that if they could run it as a nonprofit, they'd be able to take donations and use Peanut's massive social media following to build a community who could help sustain it years into the future.
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
Around the same time, Mark quit his job as a building site inspector to dedicate himself full-time to the farm. He and his wife started buying old and injured horses who'd been neglected or were destined for the slaughterhouse.
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The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
Over the next several hours, DEC officers made Mark and his wife stand by as they scoured the property in search of Mark's celebrity squirrel.
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The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
On a typical day last year, before everything changed, Mark would wake up at 5 a.m. to feed the animals. Then he might take a shower while making a sexually explicit video for a paying stranger on OnlyFans. Then he might run Peanut through some of their classic bits to make content for the Instagram account.
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The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
Followed by a video for the Animal Sanctuary's non-profit donors to show them that the rescue donkeys were actually getting the care they needed. It was this kind of miraculous, precarious social media Rube Goldberg machine.
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The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
In the aftermath of Peanut's death, Mark was devastated and confused. On the one hand, he just lost his best friend and business partner. And on the other, he'd never been so squarely at the center of the Internet's attention in his life. All of a sudden, you had politicians and celebrities and strangers from all around the world reaching out to offer their outrage and condolences.
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The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
Mark and his wife started by creating an emergency GoFundMe page while Peanut's death was still at the top of the news cycle. They also began a legal campaign to try to press the government for answers about what had happened to Peanut.
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The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
How did you first find out that peanut had been turned into some form of cryptocurrency?
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
On the morning of October 30th, 2024, Mark Longo was doing what he does most mornings. He was at his animal sanctuary on a farm in upstate New York, feeding the several hundred horses and goats and pygmy donkeys he's rescued, many of which he and his wife have saved from the slaughterhouse. So where were you when the raid began?
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The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
It took a while for Mark to piece this together, but it appeared that just hours after the news of Peanut's death started going viral, some anonymous person or group online had turned Peanut into a meme coin, a kind of joke cryptocurrency. The meme coin featured an iconic image of Mark holding Peanut with a cowboy hat, and it had the ticker sign P-N-U-T.
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The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
Now, Mark knew barely anything about crypto at this point, but he understood there were now thousands of total strangers cumulatively making millions of dollars off of Peanut's good name on the Internet. And none of those profits were flowing to Mark or the animal sanctuary.
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
After the break, Mark Longo takes his final step into the deepest, darkest recesses of the squirrel hole.
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
OK, so for the first seven years of his life with Peanut the Squirrel, Mark Longo had managed to keep control over the growing streams of attention they generated together, like on Instagram or TikTok or OnlyFans. But in the wake of Peanut's death in the world of meme coins, Mark discovered he had little or no control.
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
Peanut's viral popularity had been leveraged by a group of anonymous crypto insiders into ludicrous amounts of money, tens of millions of dollars.
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
The DEC officers did not let Mark take Peanut out of state. Instead, they took Peanut and Fred into custody. And after a few days of waiting and wondering where they'd been taken, a local news reporter calls Mark with some unsettling news.
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
At first, he says, some of the people who seemed to be behind these coins did offer to make donations to the animal sanctuary. All they asked was that Mark basically promote their coins on social media.
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
once he did they sent him donations some in the form of meme coins but Mark says soon after some of those traders figured out a way to take back their donations and partly in retaliation for that and partly because he needed real money to feed his animals Mark sold off a big chunk of the coins he'd been given
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The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
Fast sums of money seemed tantalizingly close, maybe within reach. If he won big on a meme coin, he could stop doing OnlyFans. He would never have to worry about the money to feed his 300-plus rescue animals. So, he says, when some acquaintances offered to help him create a competing peanut meme coin that they could market as the one true peanut-based cryptocurrency, he took them up on their offer.
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The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
Rumi says that finding the most profitable meme coins is all about keeping track of what's popping off in the zeitgeist. He keeps news notifications on for all sorts of outlets, but he says that sensational stories from the right wing of the political spectrum often get the most traction. Another big thing he watches for are animal coins.
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
From the original meme coin, Dogecoin, to a recent one based off of Mudang the Pygmy Hippo, animal coins have proven to be a highly lucrative asset class.
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
And at what point did you decide to get in on the peanut coin?
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
But Rumi says he got nervous pretty quickly. He decided to hop off the peanut rocket after making only a few thousand dollars. And then he just kind of moved on, watched the peanut coin situation from afar. When Elon Musk started tweeting about peanut, the price of the coin skyrocketed and eventually reached a market cap of over $2 billion.
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
We reached out to the New York Department of Environmental Conservation, but they didn't get back to us. According to a statement from the department, Peanut had bitten someone involved with the investigation. And as part of a protocol to test whether Peanut or Fred had rabies, both of them had been euthanized.
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The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
And listening to Mark's pitch, Rumi says, it was clear that Mark was getting something fundamentally wrong about how the meme coin world works. Mark seemed to be making a sort of earnest appeal about how switching peanut meme coins would somehow bring justice for his untimely death. But, Rumi says, Mark was speaking largely to people who were just looking to profit.
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The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
Nevertheless, Mark persisted. The Justice meme coin fell apart after Mark and his partners started accusing each other of fraudulent behavior. So Mark actually launched another peanut coin. But so far, that one too has failed to gain traction. It's currently stalled at a market cap of just a few hundred thousand dollars.
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The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
Because the people behind the peanut coin are anonymous, Mark isn't able to sue them directly. So instead, Mark's lawyers have filed cease and desist letters against the major crypto exchanges where the biggest peanut meme coins are listed. He alleges they violated his copyright by using his photos and that they violate a trademark that he's recently applied for.
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The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
The strategy is still something of a long shot, but there have been some successful court cases arguing for ownership of memes. And if he were to successfully get some of these coins delisted, he could have major implications for the whole world of meme coins.
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
So the house that Peanut built feels a bit like a straw house at the moment.
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
In the meantime, Mark says that he and his family are making ends meet. They're covering their costs through a mixture of donations and OnlyFans revenue. He's still holding out hope that the anonymous traders behind the most popular peanut-based cryptocurrencies will eventually cut him in on the proceeds.
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The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
And he hopes that one day, he won't have to keep making OnlyFans content to keep his rescue animals alive. If you want to know why everyone seems to be releasing meme coins these days, from literal children to C-list celebrities to the president of the United States, check out our recent episode, The Meme Coin Casino.
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
It's the story of how meme coins went from a one-off joke to a massive speculative frenzy worth tens of billions of dollars. This episode was produced by James Sneed. It was edited by Jess Jang, fact-checked by Sierra Juarez, and engineered by Jimmy Keeley. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer.
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
Mark takes to social media to tell the world what had happened, and pretty soon, the story goes absolutely viral.
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
Did you ever imagine that Peanut might find an afterlife on the blockchain?
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi. You can think of the story of Peanut the Squirrel as a kind of modern parable, a tale about how a chance encounter can change your life, bring you fame and fortune, but also how that attention can spin wildly out of your control.
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
Today on the show, how an anonymous baby rodent rose to become a world-famous animal influencer, then a political martyr, and finally, a piece of cryptocurrency worth billions of dollars, joining the ranks of Dogecoin, Hoctua, and President Donald Trump. And what all of this says about the brave, new, kind of terrifying attention economy we are all living in.
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
It's one of the bushiest tales we've ever told. About a month ago, freelance reporter Nick Nevis and I took a trip to Peanuts Freedom Farm in upstate New York. We were there to visit Mark Longo and see the tiny empire that his Celebrity Squirrels fame helped build, the house that Peanut built.
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
That is when Mark saw something strange and menacing approaching the property. A convoy of SUVs with New York state government decals on the door. They're from an agency called the DEC. What does DEC stand for? Department of Environmental Conservation.
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The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
The room is filled with peanut memorabilia sent in by fans around the world. The walls and ceilings are covered in newspaper clippings and drawings. And under glass, the pièce de résistance, a tiny squirrel-sized, like, one-ounce cowboy hat.
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
Now, the story of how this one squirrel rose from an anonymous street rodent to a world-famous animal influencer begins seven years ago, on a sunny spring day in midtown Manhattan.
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The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
Mark is a lifelong animal lover, doesn't want the squirrel to die, so he brings it home and starts trying to figure out how to nurse it back to health. The little guy seems to love peanuts at first, so that is what Mark names him. But pretty soon, Peanut reveals himself to be a pretty picky eater.
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The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
Mark decides to start an Instagram account for Peanut. He starts posting videos of Peanut wearing little costumes, like that cowboy hat or a miniature ranger's jersey.
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The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
One of these Department of Environmental Conservation officers gets out of the car and tells Mark they'd come to his farm in order to take somebody into custody. And then he produced a search warrant. But the warrant wasn't for Mark or his wife or any of the people on the farm. The warrant was for a squirrel named Peanut.
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
When did you first get the sense you might have a viral social media star on your hands? It kind of just happened.
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
And this is where the story of Peanut the squirrel meets the modern attention economy and the central question it raises. When you have the world's attention, how do you actually turn that into money?
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
For a long time, attention, this scarce resource, was monopolized by newspapers and TV or radio companies who used the power of celebrity or news or scandal to draw in as many eyeballs as possible in order to sell ads.
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The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
Which is exactly what happened when Peanut's first viral video popped off. After that, a popular animal video website called The Dodo posted a video featuring Mark and Peanut.
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The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
Mark says Peanut warmed to this newfound limelight right away. He was just a preternaturally charismatic mini fauna, especially when the cameras were rolling.
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The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
Now, when it came to monetizing all this newfound attention, Mark says he never set out to make money off his tiny, furry best friend. But as Peanut's profile grew in the attention economy of social media, all sorts of strange new opportunities started to present themselves.
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The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
Now, Mark says there's just a natural limit to the kind of brand opportunities that'll flow to a squirrel. Peanut wasn't exactly Kim Kardashian.
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The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
And then one day, Mark says, someone from the website Cameo reached out to get Peanut on the platform. And this is the second big moment where Peanut's story intersects with the modern attention economy and how it's changed over the past decade.
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The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
Like you could get your favorite side character from Seinfeld to wish your aunt Vovi a happy birthday.
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
Cameo was an innovation on the attention economy model because before, while creators had been able to make money through brand deals, it was the platforms like Instagram and YouTube that were making the lion's share of the profits from all this attention by using user data to sell targeted ads. Cameo offered a way for niche celebrities to sell themselves directly to individual consumers.
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
What was going on here was that Mark's pet squirrel, Peanut, had become one of the most famous squirrels in the world. Thanks to social media, Peanut had reached the status of animal influencer. He had over a million followers on Instagram and TikTok. But as the DEC officers reminded Mark, it is illegal in the state of New York to keep wildlife as a pet without a special permit.
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The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
Early on, Cameo suggested people set their prices by calculating how much they are usually paid per minute based on their salary. Like, if you are an NBA star making $25 million a year, you should be making about $200 a minute, which could help you set your rate for a 30-second birthday video.
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The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
Mark would dress Peanut up in costume and have him hold a little post-it note with whatever message had been ordered. They did birthdays, Valentines, even a proposal. With Cameo, they had taken their second step down the squirrel hole of the attention economy.
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The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
And it was actually Mark who would become the star of this next chapter. He says it wasn't too long before he started to notice that a lot of the attention they were getting was directed toward him. Mark is a buff guy, works out a lot, and he explains he'd often wear these tight-fitting gym pants in Peanut's videos.
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The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
OnlyFans for the uninitiated is a video streaming platform where content creators make customized content for paying subscribers. Mostly it's homemade adult content. It's kind of like the Etsy of porn.
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
OnlyFans customers can subscribe to a performer's channel for a flat fee and then pay for premium perks like private video conversations with their favorite performer or access to increasingly intimate photos and videos.
Planet Money
The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin
Successful OnlyFans performers can make six or even seven-figure salaries, more than Mark was making as a building site inspector. The manager told Mark if he could convert enough peanut fans from Instagram into paying customers on OnlyFans, they could make a killing.