The man who struck a chord with American society has issued a cryptocurrency.

Original article | Odaily Planet Daily ( @OdailyChina )

Author｜Azuma ( @azuma_eth )

Who is the most talked-about person in America right now? The answer might not be Trump or Musk, but a man named Nick Shirley.

Who is Nick Shirley? He is an independent investigative journalist who is currently stirring up emotions in American society. On December 27, Nick Shirley released several investigative videos on social media platforms such as X, Instagram, and YouTube, accusing Minnesota of rampant fraud and corruption.

In the video, Nick Shirley visits a Somali-run daycare center that was supposed to be open during its operating hours but was not in session, and the 99 registered students listed in the public records were nowhere to be found. Nick Shirley asked a local resident who had lived in the area for eight years about this, and the interviewee said, "I've lived here since 2017, but I've never seen any of the children."

In the video, Nick Shirley said, “This is one of hundreds of ‘daycare centers’ that have received millions of dollars in funding from the government. This daycare center, which even spells ‘learning’ like this, received $1.9 million in tax-free funding... And this is just one of thousands of businesses in Minnesota suspected of fraudulent operations... Minnesota Governor Tim Walz knew about these frauds but never reported them.”

Nick Shirley's video sparked a massive amount of attention and discussion in the United States, with the total number of views across the internet reaching hundreds of millions in just two days. The 42-minute full-length investigative video on X alone garnered over 100 million views.

Prominent figures from the political and business sectors have also engaged with Nick Shirley. US Vice President Vance repeatedly retweeted and replied, stating that Nick Shirley's research is more valuable than all the entries for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize; Musk also followed Nick Shirley's account, highly praising his media value and calling learning "the word of the year."

Here's some additional background on American politics: Minnesota is generally considered a traditional stronghold for the Democratic Party in American politics, but in recent years the political landscape has changed significantly, showing characteristics of a swing state. More importantly, the current governor, Tim Walz, was Harris's running mate in the 2024 election and had the opportunity to take Vance's current vice-presidential position... So it's not surprising that Vance would personally take the field and launch an attack.

Given the high level of interest in this topic, and its inherent social and political attributes that memes love, the on-chain community was naturally quick to respond.

First, the community spontaneously hyped up the most abstract misspelling in this survey, "learing," and the meme token's market value on the Solana chain is currently reported at $3.34 million.

Following this, the community discovered that Nick Shirley had apparently registered on Zora's creator platform and issued a personal creator token, $thenickshirley, on Coinbase. Subsequent comments and interactions between Coinbase founder Brian Armstrong and Nick Shirley confirmed that the token was indeed issued by him.

As of this writing, $thenickshirley's market capitalization is currently $5.65 million (it once reached a high of $9.02 million), while Nick Shirley himself has earned $41,646 in creator earnings through royalties.

Brian Armstrong stated that this proves that content monetization on the Base platform is more effective than on other platforms, and Nick Shirley also thanked Brian Armstrong after making money, praising Base and Zora as "legendary".

In addition, the prediction market Polymarket quickly followed up with its speculations on how this topic would be handled, and the current odds are shown in the image below:

An hour ago, Nick Shirley posted Venmo and an encrypted address on X, openly allowing "tipping".

From the emerging meme trend $thenickshirley to Nick Shirley's token issuance, and then to the launch of "omnichannel crowdfunding" and the continued catalysis from the outside market, we have witnessed a symphony of online media and open finance.

This is by no means a simple meme speculation, but more like a real-world experiment about "creator economy + on-chain content monetization" —an individual with huge dissemination power and public issue influence in the real world directly completed the monetization loop of attention through on-chain tools without sponsors, platform revenue sharing, or advertisers.

It doesn't verify "how high this token can go," but rather a more fundamental question: can content truly be monetized on decentralized platforms in a less frictional and more transparent way? This may hold the key to the future evolution of the media industry.