Are BAGS a "money-printing machine" for Web2 developers? Or a high-level meme hunting ground?
Written by: KarenZ, Foresight News
These past few days, it's hard not to be bombarded with BAGS posts on Twitter.
The popularity of BAGS stems not only from the massive influx of on-chain players, but also from an article that went viral – a long article titled "Bags and the Creator Economy" published by programmer Steve Yegge on January 15, which described his experience with BAGS, from "suspicion of a scam" to "it's actually great".
When a tech geek meets a windfall
The article's author, Steve Yegge, is no ordinary person. This veteran technologist, with 40 years of coding experience and having worked for giants like Amazon, Google, and Grab, is known for his sharp criticism of platform architecture and his extreme engineering thinking.
The script here is excellent:
1. Suspected Scam : Steve Yegge received a message on LinkedIn saying someone was sending him money (initially $49,000), mentioning that developer Geoffrey Huntley had just received $56,000 the previous week. His wife suspected it was a scam, and his intuition told him it was a trick, but he tried it anyway.
2. Real Money : The money actually arrived in his account! This made him realize that BAGS might not be a simple On-Chain meme scheme, but rather a paradigm shift in the creator economy.
Steve Yegge points out, "BAGS is a marketplace that fuels creativity, where people try to predict and support future winners. These creators can be individuals or small teams, and they are creating amazing things. As we move into 2026, with tools like Gas Town, individual creators will be able to produce products comparable to those of large companies."
When this "tech geek" began to seriously analyze a Web3 product, the market briefly realized that BagsApp might not just be a meme frenzy, but a fundamental restructuring of the creator economy. Many believe he represents the most hardcore and pragmatic engineering thinking in Silicon Valley.
How do BAGS work?
BAGS is a token launch and trading platform on Solana that utilizes Meteora. Unlike most launch platforms, it allows creators to specify who receives the transaction royalties when issuing tokens. Currently, the default token transaction royalty on BAGS is 1%.
This presents a new opportunity for Web2 developers. Even if they don't issue or hold tokens, they can still generate continuous passive income as long as the tokens have trading volume.
Whether it's individuals creating tokens and setting their own royalties, or communities issuing tokens for developers they support and designating their wallets or Twitter accounts to receive the revenue, both lower the barrier for creators to monetize their work.
In addition, BAGS has a dividend feature. Token creators can enable a fee-sharing mechanism to reward a portion of trading revenue to top-ranking holders. The system checks every 24 hours, and if more than 10 SOL of rewards remain unclaimed, they will be automatically distributed to the top 100 holders according to their holdings.
In addition, holding the token grants access to the community chat for that currency, achieving a native integration of finance and social interaction.
In another sense, BAGS created a highly deceptive kind of "gentleness": even if you don't issue your own token, as long as you have a reputation, the community can force you to give them money.
But this also presents a paradox: when a developer can profit through "passive royalties," is he still motivated to complete those tedious, lengthy, and potentially unsuccessful technical deliverables?
BAGS ecosystem leading meme
The top two memes for BAGS ecosystem tokens by market capitalization are:
RALPH (current market capitalization of $29 million)
This token pays homage to the "Ralph Wiggum Technique" in the AI programming community (which involves using AI for trial and error until the code works). Created by the community, it's a meme of this development culture. Geoffrey Huntley has not deployed the smart contract.
Gas (current market capitalization of $9.24 million)
Gas originates from Gas Town, an AI coding agent coordinator released by Steve Yegge. On January 2, 2026, Steve Yegge released Gas Town, a tool that can manage multiple AI coding agents simultaneously. Gas Town plans to expand this year in three areas: 1. Model cognitive capabilities; 2. Enhanced agent compatibility with Gas Town; 3. Incorporation of Gas Town and the Beads dataset into the training corpus of cutting-edge models. The Gas token is issued by the community.
More importantly, of the $270,000 in transaction fees generated by the Gas token, 99% flowed back to Steve Yegge himself, forming a seemingly perfect closed loop of "developers focusing on building and the community continuously empowering."
When "focusing on development" becomes a negative factor
However, the reality was that when Steve Yegge stated on January 17th that he would "return to development, dedicate himself fully to Gas Town, and not be able to spend too much time on CT," the community's enthusiasm instantly cooled. Gas's market capitalization peaked at $60 million on January 16th, but as of this writing, it has fallen by more than 83% from its peak.
This contradiction precisely confirms a harsh reality: the market has never regarded Gas as a real AI product, but rather as the next AI meme to hype up.
When "focusing on development" becomes a negative factor for the decline in cryptocurrency prices, we must admit that the current Web3 AI field is still a PVP battlefield dominated by the attention economy.
The awkward situation of Gas reveals the deepest structural contradiction of Web3: the speed of capital flow is in the order of seconds (transactions), while the speed of building high-quality products is extremely slow (months or even years).
In Steve Yegge's case, the market invested in him, essentially buying into his future "expectations." But the crypto market is too impatient; it demands a "positive" response the moment money is invested. When developers choose to retreat into seclusion to deliver on their promises, they precisely cut off the "emotional liquidity" that speculators need most. However, true code writing requires long periods of silence and deep immersion.
People want the Builder story to support its valuation, but they're unwilling to wait for the long process of Builder accumulating technology. Once the novelty of the story wears off, and the founders stop cooperating with traffic management, the token will revert to its speculative nature.
summary
Is the BAGS the future of the creator economy? Perhaps. But currently, it seems more like an entry ticket that allows Web2 developers to passively participate in "attention harvesting."
Web2 developers are used to being responsible for their codebases, while Web3 forces them to be responsible for market capitalization. When Steve Yegge wanted to return to his roots as an engineer, the market punished his "inaction." This is perhaps the biggest warning BAGS left for the industry: if we only learn how to "financialize" people but not how to protect their "creativity," then all we will get are empty shells drained of traffic, not a true technological revolution.
When the market begins to appreciate the long, deep dives of Builders into the code, rather than just focusing on the instantaneous surges on candlestick charts, the true spring of "long-termism" for tech geeks will arrive.
DYOR is particularly important in this battle between technology and memes.
