Iggy Azalea joins new Solana-based 'celebrity coin' launchpad Thrust as creative director, plans to migrate MOTHER token

Retired rapper turned crypto entrepreneur Iggy Azalea is migrating her MOTHER memecoin to a new Solana-based token launchpad designed for the creator economy.

This is the latest twist for the four-time Grammy-nominated artist who has been a continual advocate for celebrity coins since launching MOTHER during the height of the often controversial memecoin mania in 2024.

Powering Azalea’s migration is Thrust, a new platform that's looking to bring legitimacy to the erratic market built around memes and notoriety. The platform, officially launching on Wednesday, is attempting to reinvent how celebrities interact with onchain communities by combining the cryptographic guarantees of the blockchain with the established world of entertainment contract law.

"I've sort of been sitting dormant trying to figure out how can I create some sort of real revenue to put back into what we're doing," Azalea said, referring to MOTHER, in an interview with The Block. "How can I do more live events? How can I give more to the community? How can we do more? How can we be more interesting?"

Unlike platforms like Pump.fun, which more or less invented the "memecoin meta" when it launched on Solana in early 2024, Thrust will not allow just anyone to issue a token. "Each launch is vetted, enforceable by contract, and structured to protect both creators and fans," a project press release reads.

The hope is that by adding an element of curation — with Azalea serving as creative director, a task she describes as "onboarding pop culture into crypto" — Thrust will eliminate the insider allocations and pump-and-dump schemes that pervaded the Solana memecoin ecosystem.

"We want people who are committed to creating experiences for their fans and actually want to be here and contribute," Thrust co-founder Jake Antifaev told The Block.

The project is kicking off its offerings on Wednesday with Twitch streamer N3on, who is also signed to and a co-owner of Azalea's unrelated MOTHERLAND digital gaming casino. Azalea expects to migrate her own token by the end of the year and is reportedly in talks with actress Megan Fox to launch a token at Art Basel in December.

Celebrities are expected to sign an actual legal contract that defines their obligations to their token holders — meaning, theoretically, they can’t just launch a token, profit, and walk away. "Some have lots of deliverables, some have more conservative deliverables; we don't have a boilerplate one yet," said Antifaev, who previously founded the hemp startup Mood.

According to Antifaev, Thrust has retained Croke Fairchild Duarte & Beres, a boutique law firm with a growing footprint in the crypto space.

'Long-term participation to build real community'

Comparing the free-for-all world of platforms like Pump, where anyone can launch anything, and Thrust to Interscope Records, Azalea noted there will be "standardized deliverables, things that they need to show up for over a certain amount of time."

"I'm not talking about, you know, time-sharing somebody's social media for a week. I mean extensive, long-term participation to build real community," Azalea said. "Our goal is for them to see how they are creating value for themselves and earning off the trade fees beyond their initial payment or contract, and that they want to continue to participate because they have a reason to."

Additionally, Thrust is implementing other features to try to ensure a "fair distribution of the supply." Perhaps most notably, the platform is eliminating the bonding curve model popularized by Pump, which, at this point, primarily "rewards bots and sniper, and excludes actual believers," Antifaev said.

"The funds raised are not going to the project or to any of these celebrities," Antifaev added. "It's just going to the liquidity pool, 100% of it, so that we have a deeper liquidity pool to work with and we face a lot less volatility, which is something that Web 2.0 is going to look for when they enter the space."

"I don't want to say definitively that Pump Fun is net negative, but I think a lot of people would argue that it largely is," Azalea said. "You can say the bonding curve has all these things that are great for it, but it's like great for who? Is it great for the audience when they're trying to buy in? I don't know, debatable. I think not."

For her part, Azalea noted 1% of the MOTHER tokens launched using the new Thrust contract will be held in supply for things like community airdrops and throwing "huge f**king parties," including a year-end bacchanal at Sydney’s iconic Luna Park.