Retail Activity Spikes On Solana As Kanye West Rolls Out His Yeezy Coin

Key Insights:

• The launch of the new Yeezy coin by Kanye West has sparked discussions among traders.
• The launch triggered comparisons between Solana and Ethereum in terms of readiness for sudden spikes in activity and transactions.
• Kanye West’s token launch signals the shifting market focus towards the digital assets space.

Controversial rapper and music producer Kanye West casually launched his own token called Yeezy coin (YZY). The new token, which was launched on the Solana network, had already attracted large trading volumes within the first few hours after launch.

Kanye West made the official announcement on his official X handle on Wednesday. Preliminary information revealed that Yeezy coin made its debut as a memecoin but was geared towards utility.

The Hip-hop icon’s new YZY token was reportedly being positioned as a censorship-resistant coin. This was a callback to the highly publicized fallouts with major brands such as Nike and Adidas, which were characterized by financial disputes.

Reports also revealed that banks had refused to work with Mr. West.

Meanwhile, Yeezy coin saw its market cap surge as high as $481.7 million on Thursday morning, but it then cooled to $339 million at press time according to CoinMarketCap.

The coin’s trading volume surged by almost 35,000% in the last 24 hours. It also registered over $931 million worth of trading volume during the same period.

YZY had almost 300 million tokens in circulation and a maximum supply of 1 billion tokens. Price dropped from the day’s high of $3.1 to its $1.1 price tag at the time of observation.

Kanye West Taps Solana over Ethereum

West opted to deploy the Yeezy coin on the Solana network rather than the Ethereum network. This reignited the conversation on mass adoption readiness.

Ethereum has previously struggled with mega launches characterized by heavy volumes due to transaction throughput limitations. Such problems were nonexistent on Solana.

This preference for Solana also underscores some interesting observations. For example, the network saw a lot of excitement in 2024 and earlier this year, which was mostly driven by memecoins.

Kanye West’s new coin could potentially underscore the return of hyped coin launches, especially those backed by celebrities.

While the new coin was relatively small in the grand scheme of things, it may already be contributing to the Solana network activity.

Solana’s daily active addresses surged as high as 3.45 million on Wednesday. A significant recovery from as low as 2 million active addresses on Saturday last week.

Will the Yeezy Token Kickstart the Next Retail Wave?

There’s no doubt that retail activity was relatively weak in the first half of 2025. Most of the activity was driven by whales and institutions. However, that has been gradually changing in the second half of the year.

Kanye West’s Yeezy coin is the latest hyped cryptocurrency that targets the retail segment. It could thus become a yardstick for measuring the kind of retail activity currently present in the market.

Moreover, the return of celebrity coins could signal that the market was entering the retail speculative phase. The timing of the launch was also noteworthy, considering that the overall consensus was that the altcoin season had just started.

In the meantime, the volatility and highly speculative nature associated with heavy retail activity and new coins also pave the way for heavy manipulation. Interestingly, the Yeezy coin might already be experiencing such.

Lookonchain data revealed that one whale has already lost over $500,000 from a $1.55 million acquisition. Interestingly, this reportedly happened within 2 hours, thus demonstrating the highly speculative and risky nature of celebrity-backed coins.

As far as predictions were concerned, it was still too early to tell whether Kanye’s coin would be a hit or a miss.

The Trump coin was arguably the most popular celebrity memecoin of the year and one that has achieved significant success.

It will be interesting to see whether Kanye West’s new Yeezy coin will break into the mainstream.