A young Minecraft YouTuber raised $1,234,567 for a meme prediction market called Giggles. It broke me.
I can’t say with 100% certainty that nineteen-year-old Justin Jin doesn’t do much for me. In my defense, Jin’s company Giggles – which he describes as “a trading app and TikTok combined” – started as a joke.
“This was 2023, when TikTok was rumored to be banned, and people were trying to find a new social media platform,” Jin told TechCrunch. “So I started this meme about an app called Giggles, and it wasn’t true at the time, but it went viral on TikTok.”
The name is a joke on the joke that exists – people on TikTok see someone posting an old meme and reply, “bro banned from google giggling.” It’s supposed to be the kind of place where you can post millennial cringe (like Threads), only it’s not the real thing. But then Jin made it real.
Jin said he created a landing page for the fake app and a logo that made it look like it could be a real Google app. The site has also included a field where people can sign up for a waiting list. The site received 100,000 visits in one day, so Jin called his friend Edwin Wang to create an app.
Jin and Wang weren’t Stanford roommates, or colleagues at McKinsey, or friends from a startup incubator — no, Jin met his co-founder when he was a YouTuber running a questionable marketplace in Minecraft that ended up being shut down for violating the platform’s monetization rules.
The new company Jin would end up creating is something that could only come from a Minecraft YouTuber collecting NFTs: a TikTok-meets-Kalshi marketplace where users can post “brainrot” videos and invest “aura points” in the videos. Soon, the app will allow users to invest real cryptocurrency instead of aura. If you invest early in a meme and it gains traction, you get paid. Although it’s still an invite-only beta, Jin says 450,000 users have signed up.
“Our goal is to be the first crypto app where people spend more than, like, 30 minutes a day on it,” Jin said. “I think that if we can have that doomscroll feed that’s done really well, it naturally affects people’s dopamine cycles, and we think that this will keep them users.”
A crypto-based meme-trading app that uses people’s dopamine cycles? Creators of Minecraft YouTuber? Fundraising of exactly $1,234,567? As I worked on this story, I became paranoid – my mind eventually rotted as I wrote about brainrot, collapsing under the crushing weight of AI-generated disinformation and the impossibility of knowing if anything online is real.
I know, it seems crazy to think that someone might make an entire app a joke, but we’re in the age of vibe coding, and people are always trying to trick reporters. If he already played a joke on Google, what if TechCrunch is the next target of this strange niche, a little scandal? What if I’d been known as that writer who took Giggles seriously, derailing my career because a hopefully loving nineteen-year-old told me he used to sell fidget spinners at the playground?
My suspicions were completely unfounded. When I researched Jin’s previous company – Mediababy, formerly Poybo – the testimonials and press clips on the site were questionable. I asked the reporter quoted on the Mediababy website if their testimony was true, they didn’t even know what I was talking about. That’s probably a sign of a young founder growing up a little too close to the sun, but it rubbed me the wrong way.
I started to feel like that Pepe Silvia meme, driving myself crazy, finding unrelated clues that I could connect to prove a point. Even the launch video features a short clip of the Rickroll meme – could that be a sign?
Giggles’ $1,234,567 fundraising was led by 1k(x), so I reached out to some 1k(x) investors to secure their participation, despite the fact that I was already emailing the company’s head of sales. Some scammers have defaced the TechCrunch site to target founders – what if Jin had done the same thing? At this time, I didn’t trust anyone!
I finally got confirmation from 1k(x) that this deal is real. I also had dinner and went out. And then I felt really stupid for sending those LinkedIn DMs. (You have to admit, that fake testimony is weird, though.)
Normally, I wouldn’t be too happy to indulge myself in devoting part of an article to the origins of my limitless anxiety. But in Giggles’ case, it makes sense. It reminded me of something Jin had told me when we talked.
“I feel like bots are taking over these social media platforms, and because our current advertising model is getting likes and impressions … I think botting is going to be a big problem,” he said. “I think people trading and speculating about what’s dangerous is creating this effect of data manipulation.”
The next generation of social media apps will have to be built with the knowledge that they will be flooded with AI-generated content and suspicious bot behavior. The promise of social media is to use the internet to bring people closer together, yet we are approaching an age where we can’t find each other amidst all the slack. It’s no wonder that Jin’s generation adopted the wrong form of humor and called their own creation brainrot.
“Everyone can make content easier, and people are more honest, because you can’t be anonymous – like, with Facebook or whatever, you can’t post brainrot,” he said. And to be honest, I think a lot of young people are confused. The world is strange right now.
Giggles – which I am 99% sure is a real company at this point – has eight employees, aged from 19 to 38. Jin himself is the youngest.
“It’s a very risky thing, starting a company,” he said. “Actually it’s gambling. You’re trying to bet yourself and think you’re going to pass the job.”
I asked him if he saw Giggles as gambling.
“I wouldn’t consider it gambling. I think lottery tickets are gambling. I think things are gambling. Those are great,” he said.
Yet at the same time, he admits to reproducing memecoins – cryptocurrencies based on memes that have no intrinsic value, often subject to rugby towing scams.
“A lot of people say that meme coins are kind of zero-sum, and right now, honestly, they probably are,” Jin said. “But you see them organizing information and providing a lot of entertainment, and I think we can be the most informative platform in the world.”
I can’t tell you that Giggles will solve the bot problem and make the internet feel human by betting crypto on brainrot memes. But at least I can tell you that Jin will be an interesting inventor to keep an eye on, and that he (probably) doesn’t pull pranks.
