Regulatory crackdown spawns anti-SEC 'CultureCoin'
A small group of community members have come together to create a decentralized memecoin known as NotWifGary (NWG) — a project taking an anti-Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), pro-Ethereum stance. This development follows regulators’ recent intensified focus on the crypto industry
Although some members of NWG have a background in the zkEVM ecosystem Linea, NWG member Marco Monaco told Cointelegraph that „this is a personal initiative“ for the whole team — explicitly stating that the project has no ties to Linea or Consensys.
This is like activism, a different form of it, peaceful and focused on fun. Companies that today are engaging with SEC will have to focus most of their time and efforts in the lawsuits. NWG wants to be the community side of this, amplifying what is going on, creating talking points and doing with the meme culture to be focused around fun.
Together with 11 “brave friends,” Monaco attributed the creation of the project to “regulatory uncertainty” that is impacting Ethereum.
If successful, NWG will have a treasury and a DAO. The hope is that companies that will get sued by regulators and will have demonstratable issues in paying for the legal costs, will be able to create proposals to the DAO to get part of the costs covered with the NWG treasury. But that’s a mid-long term scenario. for now the focus is to go live with this memecoin.
The official NWG project posted on X on May 15, stating that it aims to “stand […] against Gary Gensler and the SEC, who are unlawfully threatening digital property by attacking Ethereum and open-source developers.“
NotWifGary [$NWG] will be a memecoin, more specifically a CultureCoin. It will go live in the most decentralized way with a truly fair launch. The 12 project supporters proposing $NWG are all doxxed http://notwifgary.xyz/, and 100% of the allocation will be deployed in a pool.
On its website, the project states that its memecoin will launch on Linea as an ERC20 token, “deployed from a multisig wallet involving Original Project Supporters.”
The NWG project is not yet live and is set to have it’s liquidity pool (LP) bootstrapped through community donations to ensure the token is „sufficiently decentralized“ and has a „fair launch.“
Donations will not provide any allocation of $NWG tokens. Donors will receive the „$NWG Launch Team“ SBT.
The SEC has recently taken regulatory action against high-profile company Robinhood, issuing a Wells notice on May 4, and causing Exodus‘ NYSE listing to be delayed on May 10.
Related: Crypto Biz: SEC targets Robinhood, Grayscale’s Ethereum ETFs, and more
Democratic Party Rep. Wiley Nickel explained on May 15 that the SEC was turning crypto into „a political football,“ unnecessarily forcing President Biden to „choose sides“ on the matter.
Nickel’s comment follows on the heels of the proposed Staff Accounting Bulletin (SAB) 121 rule mandating that SEC-reporting entities record custodied crypto as liabilities on balance sheets.
