Surely Drake has heard of meme coins, the relatively new trend in the crypto world where pretty much anyone can launch their own cryptocurrency and boost its value through viral stunts. There was the infamous Green Dildo Coin that spurred pranksters into throwing green dildos onto the court during WNBA games, and shortly before the inauguration, President Donald Trump launched the coins $TRUMP and $MELANIA in a move that many analysts believe could have brought nearly $2 billion in essentially anonymous donations to Trump’s White House. Most of these coins are launched on the blockchain Solana, and they commonly start with Pump.fun, which has become the de facto platform for starting meme coins, thanks to the fact that it does not require any technical know-how to get coins started. Recently, Pump.fun relaunched its streaming platform, enabling users to promote their coins through livestreams.
All of this shouldn’t be news to Drake, a co-owner of the crypto gambling site Stake, which also owns the streaming platform Kick, where Drizzy often streams himself wagering frightening amounts of money on what look like low-budget iPhone games. Still, not even the ever-tapped-in Aubrey Graham could’ve imagined his music getting leaked by a couple of teenagers livestreaming to pump the value of their meme coin. Over the weekend, during a Pump.fun stream promoting a coin that they call $BAGWORK, two young creators played what sounded like an unreleased single from Drake’s upcoming album Iceman. The leak took Drake by such surprise that he called into the Kick stream of his resident young people whisperer, Adin Ross, to find clues about who these kids were. At first, Ross seemed skeptical, as Drake is known to roll out songs via unconventional means, and assumed he was aware of the streamers’ identities. “Fuck no, I just asked you who they are,” Drake responds, sounding agitated. “What the fuck.”
The song played on $BAGWORK’s stream has the same beat that Drake teased in the second episode of his Iceman livestream last month, leading fans to believe the track is indeed authentic. On the alleged leak, Drake appears to take shots at LeBron James, rapping, “I wanna do shit to the king/When you were a part of the team, we planned Mexico trips in the spring/Must’ve been dealing with spur-of-the-moment, because why (Kawhi) did we think you could get us a ring?” During his stream, Ross says he DM’d the creators of $BAGWORK to find out how they got the track. They allegedly told Ross the only way they’d reveal their methods was if he came onto their stream.
Clips from $BAGWORK’s livestream quickly went viral, contributing to their coin briefly skyrocketing in value, reaching a peak market cap of $53 million before dwindling down to a comparatively paltry $30.89 million. In an effort to curb “pump-and-dump” schemes where creators quickly sell off their coin once it goes viral, Pump.fun offers creators an added incentive by sharing a portion of the transaction fees on all trades made on their coin, meaning the more people trade a particular coin, the more income a creator can make without having to sell. According to data on the Pump.fun site, the $BAGWORK creators were able to make $83,410 in creator rewards alone over the weekend, thanks to their stream going viral. Leaking a new Drake track isn’t the pair’s first brush with online stunts, either. The coin’s creators have run across the field at Los Angeles Dodgers games and gotten into scuffles with famous gym creators, all as a means of hyping up their coin.
Started by Alon Cohen, Noah Tweedale, and Dylan Kerler in 2024, Pump.fun has quickly become one of the largest crypto platforms in the world. In June, the company reportedly raised nearly $600 million in a matter of minutes as part of their ICO, or Initial Coin Offering, during which Pump.fun launched its own official coin, PUMP. When combined with private investment, the company’s ICO successfully raised over $1 billion. Last year, Pump.fun rolled out a live streaming tool that allowed users to promote their coins on a live stream, but quickly paused the program as creators took to the platform to engage in activities ranging from self-harm to animal cruelty in an attempt to raise the value of their coins. After implementing content-moderation measures, the company revived its livestreaming program earlier this year; however, it remains unclear how it intends to handle copyrighted material, such as song leaks, being shared on the platform. (A representative for Drake did not respond to our request for comment; nor did reps for Pump.fun and the creators behind $BAGWORK.)
Something of a runoff from the NFT boom of the early 2020s, so-called Creator Capital Markets like Pump.fun — which involve creators offering partial ownership in their content via tokenized digital products like meme coins — has exploded in popularity in recent years, and offers more evidence of the world becoming increasingly meme-ified. As Rolling Stone pointed out in August, meme coins have come to represent the logic of meme culture infecting the real world. Even an artist as big as Drake is no match for the online meme-brained masses. Surely, nothing nefarious or evil will come from any of this.
