Iggy Azalea is facing a class action lawsuit over her meme coin that has crashed in value by 99.5%.
The lawsuit, filed in New York federal court on May 5, alleges that the rapper marketed the coin in a deceptive fashion. The suit claims that the rapper said the token would have uses that never materialized. Because of this, it claims, investors lost out on money.
Lawyers for Wisconsin resident Kenneth Kolbrak, who wants damages on behalf of the investors who bought Azalea’s meme coin and lost money, said in the lawsuit that, “This case is not about ordinary volatility in a cryptocurrency or the inherent risk that a speculative digital asset may decline in value. It is about a celebrity-led promotional campaign that induced consumers to purchase and hold a digital token through specific, material representations about real-world utility, commercial integrations, institutional market maker support, and continuing development.”
Azalea released her coin, MOTHER, in late 2024 amidst a wave of celebrities and influencers releasing their own memecoins. Azalea stayed closely involved with the coin, promoting it on social media and even announcing several planned ventures like an online casino called Motherland and a luxury retail marketplace — ventures in which, per the suit, the MOTHER coin was supposed to be used as exclusive currency.
"I hope you held on to your $MOTHER[.] You'll need it to get into MOTHERLAND," she tweeted in September of 2024, according to the complaint.
The casino did end up opening last year, but the lawsuit alleges that its core operations used the cryptocurrency stablecoin tether instead of MOTHER. Additionally, the lawsuit claims that the rapper said users could purchase phones and pay bills with MOTHER through Unreal Mobile, which is not actually an option. Azalea also allegedly advertised that the luxury marketplace, DreamVault, would exclusively accept MOTHER (and that using the coin would give buyers a 10% discount), but that didn’t materialize either.
All of this, Kolbrak says, eliminated demand for the coin. In addition, he says that Azalea was deceptive about those benefits, initially claiming they would build value for the coin, but then backtracking and referring to them as just “perks.” Now, the coin is worth just one-tenth of cent, down from an all-time high of 24 cents.
Kolbrak is seeking up to triple damages, as well as attorney’s fees. He’s being represented by Burwick Law, the firm that was behind the lawsuit filed against Hailey “Hawk Tuah” Welch over her meme coin disaster.
Last August, Azalea spoke to ABC’s Nightline about launching the meme coin. "It seemed to me that, especially with meme tokens, they were central to virality, and that really interests me, obviously,” she said.
