Iggy Azalea’s MOTHER Token Slated for Phone Payments, Cryptocurrency Hits $200 Million Market Cap

Key Takeaways

• Iggy Azalea has said a phone company she owns will accept Sol and MOTHER as payment.
• Mother Iggy is a Solana-based token launched by Azalea
• MOTHER has been criticized by Vitalik Buterin.

After Iggy Azalea launched Mother Iggy (MOTHER) on Solana, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin derided the trend for celebrity meme coins. 

But Buterin’s criticism did little to dampen appetite for MOTHER, which has amassed a market capitalization of over $180 million at the time of writing. Helping to spur the rally on, Azalea said she would relaunch a telecommunication company she founded and let people pay for phones and monthly plans with MOTHER or Sol.

MOTHER Pumps Following Iggy Azalea Phone Company Announcement

Although she didn’t initially name the purported phone business, in a follow-up to her first announcement, Azalea said “Unreal Mobile is a service provider,” and “we offer a selection of phones for purchase.” In another post , she said Sphere Labs would handle payments.

In a previous statement , Azalea claimed to own 25% of an unnamed telecommunications company, but it isn’t clear whether she was referring to Unreal. 

Unreal has not confirmed any plans to accept MOTHER or Sol. At the time of writing, it had not responded to CCN’s questions about the purported scheme.

Vitalik Buterin vs. Iggy Azalea

Responding to a post on X about Azalea’s MOTHER, Buterin said he was “feeling quite unhappy” about recent “celebrity experimentation” in the crypto space.

Referring to the NFT project endorsed by Mila Kunis, Ashton Kutcher and Chris Rock, he added, “Stoner Cats was vastly more honorable than anything we’ve seen from this 2024 celebrity memecoin era – at least there was an actual show being funded.” 

Buterin’s latest intervention reflects his increasingly outspoken criticism of crypto projects whose sole purpose is to make money from speculative trading.

Back in March, he outlined an alternative vision for meme coins to be more than simply get-rich-quick schemes for early adopters. 

In an apparent response to Buterin’s comments, on Wednesday, June 5, Azalea shared a meme depicting the Ethereum founder as a baby with the caption, “he was just hangry.”

The Problem With Celebrity Crypto Endorsements

While Mother Iggy is an especially brazen attempt to use crypto to monetize a personal brand, the Australian musician is hardly the first celebrity to do so.

However, celebrity endorsements of cryptocurrencies don’t exactly have a good track record. 

While the likes of Lil Yachty and Logan Paul have managed to avoid criminal liability for the alleged SafeMoon fraud, a parallel civil lawsuit brought by out-of-pocket SFM investors names a string of celebrity endorsers as defendants. 

A host of celebrities who lent their voice to FTX’s various advertising campaigns are also being sued for their role in promoting the now-failed crypto exchange. 

Then of course, there’s EthereumMax, the now-worthless token shilled by Floyd Mayweather and Kim Kardashian. (Mayweather was also implicated in the multi-million dollar Centra Tech scam.)

Prospects for Mother Iggy

Aside from those that turned out to be fraudulent, even legitimate celebrity crypto projects are rarely a good investment.

When Steve Aoki released an NFT collection in 2021, it generated $3.4 million on its first day with the most expensive mint selling for $100,000. Today, it has been over a month since the last NFT swapped hands and the floor price for the collection has tanked to just 0.14 ETH (around $540). 

And that’s just one example of a celebrity-backed crypto project that flopped. There are dozens more.

For Mother Iggy, Buterin’s criticism may have actually helped to boost the meme coin by giving it free publicity. The promise of a genuine use case in the purported Unreal Mobile tie-in could also help distinguish MOTHER from countless other celebrity crypto projects. But with precious little information to go off, it is still too early to tell whether that will be the case.