Jess Jiang
speaker
70 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Jess Jiang’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So the house that Peanut built feels a bit like a straw house at the moment.
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.
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.
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.
This is NPR. Thanks for listening.
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