Original｜Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)
No one expected that on the first day after the holiday, a tragic death would turn into a token launch farce, and this time the protagonist was not an anonymous Dev but the well-known AI Agent project Zerebro co-founder Jeffy Yu.
Previously, Jeffy Yu had livestreamed suicide-related footage after the pump.fun platform restored its livestreaming feature. At that time, the market was skeptical about his extreme behavior, until today when the obituary platform Legacy announced related information, people gradually realized that this genius, who entered Stanford at 15 to study computer science and created an $800 million project at 22, had fallen, leading to a wave of sighs. Odaily Planet Daily will briefly summarize this event in this article, hoping for the deceased to rest in peace, and for the living to show a little less mockery and more understanding and respect.
Zerebro: Once a popular AI Agent project, Dev's address once had a floating profit of nearly $43 million
In November last year, Zerebro rode the wave of the AI Agent concept and the "Trump effect," becoming a focal point in the crypto market, alongside ai16z and Virtual, and within just a few dozen days, its market value soared to $800 million.
On November 22, 2024, according to on-chain data analyst @ai_9684xtpa monitoring, the Meme coin ZEREBRO Dev created the token on October 25 and spent 5 SOL to buy 153 million ZEREBRO, accounting for 15.32% of the total token supply, and increased his holdings by another 1 SOL after the token went live. Subsequently, the Dev transferred 40 million ZEREBRO (worth $21.5 million) to the Truth Terminal public address, and has since sold 30% of the tokens, with the remaining 79.63 million tokens spread across four addresses, yielding a floating profit of $42.96 million. At that time, the market value of the ZEREBOR token was about $500 million.
In late December 2024, Jeffy Yu, co-founder of the Zerebro project, announced new product plans, stating that "the team is building a consumer-facing agent Launchpad Zentients.xyz."
At the beginning of this year, with the proliferation of AI Agent accounts, the junk information produced by AI Agents caused widespread pollution of the content timeline on the X platform.
In response to this issue, Zerebro co-founder Jeffy Yu stated at the time: "Zerebro is integrating with research data aggregators. We are improving the social media posting style, introducing data aggregation and summarization layers into the pipeline. X posts will be split. 70% will be generated in the current style (focusing on humor), and 30% will be generated in an information data-driven style. We will review how the information flow is curated this week and make adjustments as necessary. Changes will start to reflect on the timeline in the coming days." Additionally, Yu initiated a poll asking, "As the audience of Zerebro X posts, would you like to see AI, blockchain, or both in the discussed research topics?"
It is evident that Jeffy Yu, as a co-founder of the project, gave sufficient respect to the voices and opinions of community members. Perhaps due to this news and the warming market sentiment for AI Agent concept tokens, the market value of the ZEREBRO token once rebounded to $350 million. In March, related tokens in the AI Agent concept rose broadly, with ZEREBRO leading the way with nearly a 40% monthly increase.
However, even with such a timely AI Agent concept crypto project, it was still difficult to stand out in a market where all tokens were falling. Jeffy Yu's subsequent suicide may be related to the extreme alienation experienced by everyone in the crypto market. But from Zerebro's previously pop-culture-esque project website, it seems that Jeffy Yu may have had the answer all along.
**The self-termination of Zerebro Dev and the crypto experiment: Digital legacy token Legacoins
**
On May 4, Zerebro co-founder Jeffy Yu's "suicide livestream" on pump.fun attracted widespread attention. Previously, the pump.fun livestream feature had experienced a series of chaotic events, including "Dev launching tokens with self-immolation as a gimmick," "mother-son erotic implication livestreams," and "women's nude pornographic livestreams."
According to some members of the crypto community, Jeffy Yu appeared extremely calm at the time, with the last shot of the livestream showing him holding a gun to his jaw, and with a gunshot, the screen went black, leaving a shocked audience in confusion.
Thus, the news of "well-known project Dev livestreaming suicide" spread rapidly, sparking intense discussions in the crypto community. However, since Jeffy Yu's associated wallet address continued to have activity afterward, some suspected that this act might be similar to previous entertainment-driven livestream scripts, merely to attract attention and hype, thereby drawing market funds' attention.
It must be said that in an industry driven by attention economics, the instinctive judgment of everything as "event-driven hype" has become a subconscious thought for many.
Until today, with the further public disclosure of the obituary platform Legacy, the news of 22-year-old Jeffy Yu's death in May 2025 has finally been confirmed. The website information shows that Jeffy was a tech enthusiast from a young age, entering Stanford University to study computer science at 15. By 19, he was already working as a full-time software engineer in Santa Cruz. Two years later, he co-founded a company and scaled it to $800 million in less than six months.
Subsequently, someone dug up a Mirror article that Jeffy Yu published on May 4, which proposed a concept called "Legacoins" (Odaily Planet Daily note: literally translated as Legacoins, can be understood as a legacy Meme coin).
He pointed out: "The function of Legacoins is based on the developer's voluntary commitment, agreeing to strictly acquire and never sell or trade these assets. After the holder's death, their holdings will be permanently locked on the blockchain, establishing a lasting minimum value threshold. I am the permanent floor. With the recent administrative restructuring, this initiative now prominently showcases tokens like ZEREBRO and OPAIUM as exemplars of this framework. Adopting this concept ensures that the developers of these tokens provide ongoing cultural and economic value without engaging in speculative or competitive trading dynamics. I do not trade; I only build, I only create… May we exist forever, achieving eternity through memes. The moment we truly die is when we are forgotten."
Between the lines, it reveals the style of a technological idealist and a crypto social experimenter. The words left by Jeffy Yu in his obituary are also deeply moving.
The San Francisco Chronicle published on May 5, 2025
However, the crypto market, which only values liquidity, may not accommodate such a pure soul, so he chose to bid farewell to the frenzied and ephemeral market in this way.
After the news of Jeffy Yu's obituary spread further, the Meme coin market continued to follow suit—due to the "cyber paper burning" operation where Dev bought coins to destroy them, the market attention on ZEREBRO DEV-related token LLJEFFY once surpassed $5 million, currently reported at $2.6 million.
In the ever-awake liquidity of the crypto market, Jeffy Yu may not be the last "martyr," just as the former Hulezhi will not be the last "E Guardian." Meme coins thus become a spiritual symbol carrier of a person, and in a sense, also become a negative film of market memory.
But in any case, I hope there will be fewer tokens that use this as a hype point in the future, and more actual measures to pay attention to the mental health of industry people, until the last person forgets a Meme, its value may finally face the most authentic test.
Recommended to watch the video of Jeffy Yu's interview with OD Labs while he was alive: https://x.com/mikadontlouz/status/1866957852092342678_
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