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, before briefly retracing to $5 million. However, after Vine co-founder Rus Yusupov claimed the dev identity on Twitter, the VINE price skyrocketed, reaching a peak market cap of $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 up to 10 seconds long on social networks. The platform was launched in June 2012 and was co-founded by Dom Hofmann, Rus Yusupov and Colin Kroll; in October 2012, it was acquired by Twitter (now called 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, sparking market speculation
After acquiring Twitter, Musk has expressed the idea of restarting Vine on social media multiple times.
On October 31, 2022, Musk launched a poll on Twitter, asking whether to bring back 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 on November 1, 2022, and announced that it would be ready by the end of that year, but it has not materialized 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 without launching 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 market consensus highest 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, personally issued a Meme coin of the same name, and stated on the official website that "I am launching this Meme coin to commemorate the beauty of unity and creation. I will not sell the Dev token share, and all profits will be donated to X". Although Rus Yusupov sold Vine to Twitter just 4 months after creating the short video platform, and has not had any ownership or involvement in its subsequent development and maintenance, due to his "founder" identity, the market quickly reached a consensus that his issued VINE (6A...pRpump) is the leader. Other Vine-named Meme coins are close to zero.
But the FOMO is far from over. This afternoon, Rus Yusupov posted that "All developer-held VINE tokens are locked until April 20, and will remain locked until Vine is restarted." 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 now been locked. Although the dev lock-up is a positive for the token, apart from Rus himself having a brief relationship with the Vine platform, the Meme coin he issued is just like other Meme coins, riding the hype without any real connection to the Vine platform, and the key point still lies with Musk.
It is worth noting that after selling Vine, Rus Yusupov and Dom Hofmann started a new venture in 2017, establishing the live interactive gaming app HQ Trivia. In February 2020, HQ Trivia announced its closure, and although Rus Yusupov later purchased the HQ franchise rights and maintained its operation, 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 the past. Although Vine-related Meme coins have been hyped multiple times in the past, they are still able to attract people's attention, it is just unknown 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 does not seem too unusual. After all, people who do not utilize the hype to issue tokens on attention hotspots, like Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, are already rare.
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