A decentralized exchange aggregator called Jupiter recently revealed a partnership with Irene Zhao, a Singaporean influencer who has had a rough past in the cryptocurrency space. This news has sent shockwaves through the community. Since the news came out, crypto fans and experts in the field have been very critical.
Jupiter is a well-known Solana-based decentralized exchange aggregator. The relationship with Zhao was announced in an X (formerly Twitter) post by @weremeow, the anonymous founder of the platform. This project’s aim is to make the “meme coin meta” better and give “degens an on-chain mom to care for them when they are sad,” as explained in the beginning. There were some significant issues with the meme coin launch that the founder said they wanted to fix. These included “fake wide distribution,” “sniping,” and “lying influencers.”
“If these works, ideally it can serve as a model for other memecoins in contrast to the sniping, opaque control, instadumping prone, paranoid launch meta we see today.”
@weremeow
Critics Slam Zhao Collaboration
On the other hand, people in the crypto community spoke out against the news right away. Some people don’t like the relationship because it supports Zhao, who has been linked to some sketchy crypto activities in the past. ZachXBT, the investigator, said that the connection was strange because Zhao’s project, So-Col, had a bad past. People at ZachXBT say that Zhao made shady deals with So-Col, which led to claims that she “rug-pulled” early investors by making deals with market maker DWF Labs behind their backs without telling anyone.
When DWF Labs put $1.5 million into So-Col in February 2023, they bought SIMP tokens that Zhao had promised to lock for a year. But data from the blockchain showed that DWF got more than 3 million SIMP tokens in March and then sent about 2.6 million SIMP to the KuCoin market.
Zhao first became well-known in the crypto world when she sold her pictures as non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and made more than $5 million. After that, she released an NFT collection called IreneDAO. At first, the price floor went up to 1.49 ETH. The collection’s value has dropped dramatically since then, though. According to CoinGecko data, it is now only worth 0.05 ETH.
