Original | Odaily (@OdailyChina)
Author | Golem (@web3_golem)
This morning, another fast-moving token appeared on the Solana chain - VINE. The token shares the same name as the short-video platform Vine, which Twitter announced the closure of in 2016. The token was launched just 1 hour ago and its market cap has already exceeded $100 million, though it has since pulled back to around $5 million. However, after Vine co-founder Rus Yusupov claimed the dev identity on Twitter, the VINE price skyrocketed, reaching a market cap of up to $240 million, and is currently still maintaining around $200 million.
Vine was a short-video platform similar to TikTok, allowing users to create and share video clips of up to 10 seconds. The platform was launched in June 2012 and co-founded by Dom Hofmann, Rus Yusupov and Colin Kroll. In October 2012, it was acquired by Twitter (now X), but Twitter announced the closure of Vine on October 27, 2016 as part of a corporate restructuring plan.
Musk has mentioned Vine multiple times, and the market has been stirring
After acquiring Twitter, Musk has expressed the idea of restarting Vine on social media multiple times.
On October 31, 2022, Musk launched apoll on Twitter asking whether to revive the short-video app Vine under Twitter. The results showed that 69.6% of the participating users supported the revival of Vine. After the poll results were announced, Musk immediately instructed the Twitter engineering team to restart the short-video app Vine, and announced that it would be ready by the end of that year, but nothing came of it since then.
On April 18, 2024, Musk launched the same poll on the X platform, asking whether Vine should be restarted. By that time, Meme coins on Ethereum had already emerged, and there were multiple Vine-named Meme coins on Ethereum, with the highest market cap reaching $7 million, which has now dropped to zero.
A year later, Musk mentioned restarting Vine again, but this time not through a poll. On January 19, a user on the X platform tagged Musk, saying "it's time to restart Vine", and Musk responded "considering it".
On the same day, multiple Vine-named Meme coins appeared on the Solana chain. The highest market consensus Meme coin (Fun...D4AU) reached a peak market cap of over $10 million.
Vine co-founder personally issued a token
Although there are many Vine-named Meme coins in the market, none of them have been recognized or interacted with by Vine or Musk.
Interestingly, this morning, Rus Yusupov, one of the co-founders of Vine, issued a Meme coin with the same name himself. Although he sold Vine to Twitter just 4 months after creating the short-video platform and has not owned or participated in its subsequent development and maintenance, the market quickly reached a consensus that his issued VINE (6A...pRpump) is the leading one, while other Vine-named Meme coins are close to zero.
But the FOMO is far from over. This afternoon, Rus Yusupovposted that "all VINE tokens held by developers are locked until April 20, and will remain locked until the relaunch of Vine." This announcement caused VINE to surge, with its market cap exceeding $100 million.
Rus Yusupov's address publicly holds 5% of the total VINE supply, which has already been locked. Although the dev lock-up is a positive for the token, apart from Rus himself having a brief connection with the Vine platform, his issued Meme coin is no different from other Meme coins in terms of riding the hype, and has no real connection to the Vine platform. The key point still lies with Musk.
It's worth noting that after selling Vine, Rus Yusupov and Dom Hofmann founded the live interactive gaming app HQ Trivia in 2017. In February 2020, HQ Trivia announced its closure, and although Rus Yusupov later purchased the HQ franchise and kept it running, there have been no games since November 2022, and HQ Trivia was removed from the Apple App Store and Google Play Store in August 2023.
In the current market environment, the capital capacity of Memes has exceeded previous levels. Although Vine-related Meme coins have been hyped multiple times in the past, they are still able to attract people's attention, it's just unclear whether Musk will actually fulfill his promise to restart Vine this time.
Whether Rus Yusupov's token issuance is for money-grabbing or to voice for the Vine platform, in a world where even the US President personally issues tokens, it doesn't seem too unusual. After all, people who don't leverage the hype to issue tokens on attention hotspots, like Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, are already a rarity.
