Doubters beware, digital currency isn’t just a silly idea anymore. In less than a year, the value of one Bitcoin has skyrocketed from $20 to as much as $900, while Coinbase, a “digital wallet” for Bitcoins, recently raised $25 million in funding.
With cryptocurrency’s rise in use, it’s no surprise that novelty coins have begun to pop up. There’s already Dogecoin, which is based on “Doge”, the Internet’s favorite Shiba Inu meme, and soon Coinye West will also be hitting the market place. Yes, an academic textbook isn’t the only thing inspired by Kanye West.
Coinye West is scheduled to launch on January 11th and hopes to be a more mainstream option than its predecessors. “Our goal with Coinye West is to make it easier for people to use cryptocurrency,” its creators told VICE. “Right now, it’s kind of a dark art for people to mine coins.”
They added, “We plan on releasing a front end to the ‘mining’ programs called CoinyeMiner. It will make things a lot more simple and people will be able to make their own coins. We’re working round-the-clock to get everything going as smoothly as possible.”
Why Yeezus as the face of the currency? “We chose to represent Kanye because he is and always has been a trendsetter, and he’s always keeping things unique,” they explained. “I can picture a future where Coinye is used to buy concert tickets, with cryptographically verified virtual tickets, and other ideas I can’t give away just yet.”
Coinye West is not backed by Kanye himself (yet), but its creators hope he’ll come around. “We’d love if Kanye named dropped Coinye. I think he’s gonna love that there’s a CURRENCY named in his honor. We don’t want to pay him off to name check us, but it’d be sick if he does so. In-fact, we’re making an open invitation to Kanye: Get hold of us at coinyewest.com and we’ll send you 100,000 COINYE on launch. A hundred thousand. Bitcoin started small too, and now look where it’s at.”
