A teenage Minecraft YouTuber raised $1,234,567 for a meme prediction market called Giggles. It broke me.

I cannot say with 100% certainty that nineteen-year-old Justin Jin is not pulling an elaborate prank on me. In my defense, Jin’s company Giggles – which he describes as “putting a trading app and TikTok together” – started as a joke.

“This was around 2023, when TikTok was rumored to get banned and whatnot, 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 real at the time, but it went viral on TikTok.”

The name is a riff on an existing joke — people on TikTok would see someone post a stale meme and reply, “bro got banned from google giggles.” It’s supposed to be the kind of place where you’d post millennial cringe (like Threads), only it’s not real. But then Jin made it real.

Jin said he created a landing page for the fake app and a logo that makes it look like it could be a real Google app. The site included a field where people could sign up for a waitlist. The site got 100,000 visits in one day, so Jin called up his friend Edwin Wang to actually make an app.

Jin and Wang weren’t Stanford roommates, or coworkers at McKinsey, or buddies from a startup incubator – no, Jin met his co-founder when he was a YouTuber running a dubious marketplace on Minecraft that eventually got shut down for violating platform monetization rules.

The new company that Jin would end up creating is something that could only come from a Minecraft YouTuber who collects NFTs: a TikTok-meets-Kalshi marketplace where users can post “brainrot” videos and invest “aura points” in the videos. Soon, the app will let users invest actual cryptocurrency instead of aura. If you invest early in a meme and it gains traction, you get paid. Though it is still an invite-only beta, Jin says that 450,000 users have signed up.

“The goal for us is to be the first crypto app where people spend more than, like, 30 minutes a day on it,” Jin said. “I think once we are able to be that doomscroll feed that’s really well made, it kind of naturally capitalizes on people’s dopamine cycles, and we think that this can retain users.”

A crypto-based meme trading app that capitalizes on people’s dopamine cycles? Minecraft YouTuber co-founders? A fundraise of exactly $1,234,567? As I worked on this story, I became paranoid – my brain finally rotted while writing about brainrot, crumbling under the crushing weight of AI-generated misinformation and the impossibility of knowing if anything on the internet is real anymore.

I know, it seems insane to think that someone might create a whole app as a joke, but we’re in the age of vibe coding, and people are always trying to dupe journalists. If he already played a joke on Google, what if TechCrunch is the next target of this weirdly niche, minor humiliation? What if I became known as that writer who took Giggles seriously, derailing my career because I trusted a charismatic nineteen-year-old who told me that he used to sell fidget spinners on the playground?

My suspicion was not entirely unfounded. When I researched Jin’s previous company – Mediababy, formerly Poybo – the testimonials and press clippings on the site were dubious. I asked a journalist quoted on Mediababy’s website whether their testimonial was real, and they had no idea what I was talking about. That’s probably just the mark of a young founder growth hacking 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 insane, finding unrelated clues that I could connect to prove a point. Even the launch video includes a short clip of the Rickroll meme – could that be a sign?

Giggles’ $1,234,567 fundraise was led by 1k(x), so I reached out to some 1k(x) investors to confirm their participation, despite the fact that I had already been emailing with the firm’s head of marketing. Some scammers have spoofed the TechCrunch domain to target founders – what if Jin had done the same thing? By this point, I could trust no one!

I did end up getting confirmation from 1k(x) that this deal is real. I also ate dinner and went outside. And then I felt really silly for sending those LinkedIn DMs. (You gotta admit, those fake testimonials are weird, though.)

Normally, I would not luxuriate in the self-indulgence of devoting half of an article about a startup to my own boundless anxiety. But in the case of Giggles, it kind of makes sense. It reminded me of something Jin had told me when we spoke.

“I have a feeling that bots are taking over these social media platforms, and because our current advertising model for them is getting likes and impressions… I think botting will be a huge problem,” he said. “I think people trading and guessing on what’s being viral creates this downstream effect of actually organizing information.”

The next generation of social media apps will have to be built with the knowledge that they will be swarmed 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’re approaching an era when we won’t be able to find each other in the midst of all the slop. It’s no wonder Jin’s generation has embraced a particularly nihilistic approach to humor and dubbed their own creations brainrot.

“Everybody can easily make content more, and people are being more true, because you can be anonymous — like, with Facebook or whatever, you’re not going to post brain rot,” he said. “And honestly, I think a lot of young people are kind of freaking out. The world is so weird right now.”

Giggles — which I am, like, 99% sure is a real company at this point — has eight employees, ranging in age from 19 to 38. Jin himself is the youngest.

“It’s a very high-risk thing, starting a company,” he said. “It’s basically gambling. You’re just trying to bet on yourself and think that you’ll outperform a job.”

I asked him if he sees Giggles as gambling.

“I would not consider it gambling. I think lottery tickets are gambling. I think pure chance things are gambling. Those are pretty extractive,” he said.

Yet at the same time, he acknowledges that he’s basically reproducing memecoins — cryptocurrencies based on memes with no inherent value, which are often subject to rug pull scams.

“A lot of people say meme coins are kind of zero-sum, and right now, honestly, maybe they kind of are,” Jin said. “But you do see them actually organizing information and giving a lot of entertainment, and I think we can become a platform that provides a lot of information for the world.”

I can’t tell you that Giggles will actually solve the bot problem and make the internet feel more human by wagering crypto on brainrot memes. But I can at least tell you that Jin will be an interesting founder to keep an eye on, and that he (probably) isn’t pranking you.