Founder launches cryptocurrency to quickly raise $200 million; Musk's short-video platform Vine makes a comeback
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Founder launches cryptocurrency to quickly raise $200 million; Musk's short-video platform Vine makes a comeback
Although the founder personally launched the token, VINE isn't highly associated with Musk.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Golem, Odaily Planet Daily
This morning, another quick-flip meme coin—VINE—emerged on the Solana blockchain. Sharing its name with the short-video platform Vine, which Twitter announced the shutdown of in 2016, the token's market cap surged past $100 million within just one hour of launch, before briefly pulling back to $5 million. However, after Rus Yusupov, co-founder of Vine, claimed developer status in a tweet, VINE’s price skyrocketed, reaching a peak market cap of $240 million and currently holding around $200 million.
Vine was a short-video platform similar to TikTok, allowing users to create videos up to 10 seconds long and share them across social networks. Launched in June 2012, it was founded by Dom Hofmann, Rus Yusupov, and Colin Kroll. In October 2012, it was acquired by Twitter (now X), but was shut down on October 27, 2016, as part of the company’s restructuring plan.
Repeated Mentions from Musk Spark Market Rallies
Since acquiring Twitter, Elon Musk has repeatedly expressed interest in reviving Vine via social media.
On October 31, 2022, Musk launched a poll on Twitter asking whether the platform should bring back Vine. The results showed that 69.6% of voters supported its revival. Following the poll, Musk instructed Twitter engineers on November 1, 2022, to restart development of Vine, aiming for a launch before year-end—but the effort ultimately fizzled out.
On April 18, 2024, Musk initiated another identical vote on X, again asking whether Vine should be revived. By then, meme coins on Ethereum were already gaining traction, leading to multiple Vine-branded meme coins appearing on Ethereum, with the highest-market-cap project briefly reaching $7 million—now worthless.
A year later, Musk mentioned Vine once again—not through a poll this time. On January 19, a user tagged Musk on X saying, “It’s time to bring back Vine,” to which Musk replied, “Considering it.”
That same day, several Vine-named meme coins appeared on the Solana blockchain. Among them, the most widely recognized token (Fun...D4AU) briefly surpassed a $10 million market cap.
Vine Co-Founder Jumps Into the Meme Coin Arena
Despite numerous Vine-themed meme coins flooding the market, none had received recognition or engagement from either Vine itself or Musk.
In a dramatic twist, this morning, Rus Yusupov—one of Vine’s original co-founders—launched his own namesake meme coin. Although he sold Vine to Twitter just four months after its creation and has held no ownership or involvement in its development since, his status as a “founder” instantly granted his newly issued VINE (6A...pRpump) top-tier market consensus. All other Vine-named meme coins quickly collapsed toward zero.
The FOMO didn’t stop there. On Monday afternoon, Yusupov tweeted: “All developer-held VINE tokens are locked until April 20, and will remain locked until Vine is relaunched.” Following this announcement, VINE’s price jumped sharply, surpassing a $100 million market cap.
Rus Yusupov publicly holds 5% of the total VINE supply, now locked. While dev token locking is generally seen as positive, it’s important to note that apart from Yusupov’s brief historical connection to Vine, this meme coin is fundamentally no different from others—it’s purely riding on hype and has no actual link to the original Vine platform. The real catalyst remains Elon Musk.
Notably, after selling Vine, Rus Yusupov and Dom Hofmann co-founded HQ Trivia, an interactive live-streaming game app, in 2017. HQ Trivia announced its shutdown in February 2020. Although Yusupov later acquired the franchise rights and kept it running, no new games were released after November 2022, and the app was removed from both Apple App Store and Google Play Store on August 5, 2023.
In today’s market environment, meme coins can absorb capital at unprecedented scale. Though Vine-themed tokens have been hyped multiple times before, they still capture public attention. The big question remains: will Musk finally follow through and actually revive Vine?
Whether Rus Yusupov’s move is purely profit-driven or an attempt to advocate for Vine’s revival, in a world where even U.S. presidents have entered the crypto space, such actions hardly seem unusual anymore. After all, figures like Ross Ulbricht, founder of the darknet Silk Road, who choose not to capitalize on their notoriety with a token, are becoming rare.
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