From OJ to Queen: Why Degenerates Rush to Coin Memes When Celebrities Die

The family of OJ Simpson on Thursday morning announced The controversial former soccer star has died after a years-long battle with cancer.

It was only a matter of minutes, then, before the inevitable: a series of themed, highly speculative meme coins capitalizing on the former NFL star's passing as an actor.

Named coins “OJ Simpson.” “RIP OJ Simpson.” “Gently used leather gloves”. And in fact, yes, The late O.J. He was shot within minutes of the news. The OJ themed tokens were quickly acquired Millions of dollars Trading volume is worth it, some of it's increased in value – and most of it, of course. Falling in spectacular fashion Within hours of launch.

By no means is it the first time crypto's seen this vicious cycle happen, and it certainly won't be the last. But why exactly do dignitaries rush to create meme coins when a celebrity dies?

To state the obvious first: trending topics offer marketers an attractive opportunity to ride the wave of public attention and generate buzz without doing anything.

The death of a celebrity like Simpson, Queen Elizabeth II; Charlie MungerOr Henry Kissinger, creates such situations. But Elon Musk does the same thing as a viral moment when he speaks to Twitter followers “Go yourself.”

Mainly fueling such opportunities, however, is that launching a token on certain blockchain networks has not been easy or cheap.

It's no coincidence that the top OJ Simpson meme coins coined this morning started with both. Solana or Ethereum layer-2 network basis. On both networks, the cost of minting a new token is now almost negligible.

Making things even easier are services like Solana-based. PumpIt helps users with zero technical knowledge to deploy meme coins for less than $4 transaction fees.

So it makes perfect sense why Solana and Beth have been inundated with more meme coins than they can handle in recent months. After a few signs including BONK and Dogwifhat Exploding into multi-billion dollar success stories in December, the race was on to cash in on the next big meme. (or Cat.)

some Solana users They are posting hundreds of new signs a day hoping to catch something big; Base has seen a lot of meme coin related traffic recently so the Coinbase app also relies on the network. It's broken.

News driven meme coins are always trending in crypto. But when Ethereum was the main chain for generating tokens, crypto users had to be relatively technically savvy to launch new coins, and spend enough on transaction fees to deploy them. At that point, it probably wouldn't be worth spewing out into the world as an eternal symbol any idea that crossed the mind of any crypto user.

Thanks to technological innovation, such obstacles have now been removed. We now have dozens of soon to be worthless dead OJ tokens to sift through that will live on chain until the end of time.

Edited by Andrew Hayward.