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

I can’t say with 100% certainty that nineteen year old Justin Jane isn’t pulling an elaborate prank on me. In my defense, Gene’s company Giggles — which he described as “bringing a business app and TikTok together” — started out as a joke.

“It was around 2023, when TikTok was rumored to be banned and so on, and people were trying to find a new social media platform,” Jin told TechCrunch. “So I started these memes about an app called Giggles, and it wasn’t real at the time, but it went viral on TikTok.”

The name is a running joke — people on TikTok will see someone posting an old meme and respond, “My brother got banned from laughing on Google.” This is supposed to be where you post millennial comments (like threads), but it’s not real. But then Gene made it real.

Jin said he created a landing page for the fake app and a logo that made it look like a real Google app. The website includes a field where people can sign up for a waiting list. The site got 100,000 visits in one day, so Jin called his friend Edwin Wang to actually create an app.

Jin and Wang weren’t roommates at Stanford, co-workers at McKinsey, or friends from a startup incubator — no, Jin met his co-founder when a YouTuber was running a questionable Minecraft marketplace that was eventually shut down for violating the platform’s monetization rules.

The new company that Jin will 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 “creative” videos and invest “halo points” in the videos. Soon, the app will allow users to invest in actual cryptocurrencies instead of halo. If you invest early in a meme and it gets traction, you’ll get paid. Although it’s still an invite-only beta, Jin says 450,000 users have signed up.

“Our goal is to be the first cryptocurrency app that people spend more than 30 minutes a day on,” Jin said. “I think once we’re able to be a well-made ‘Doomscroll’ extract, it naturally taps into people’s dopamine cycles, and we think that can keep users on board.”

Is it a cryptocurrency-based meme trading app that taps into people’s dopamine cycles? Minecraft YouTuber Founders? Fundraising exactly $1,234,567? As I was working on this story, I became paranoid — my brain had finally rotted away while writing about brain rot, collapsing under the weight of AI-generated misinformation and the impossibility of knowing whether anything on the Internet was real anymore.

I know it sounds crazy to think that someone would create an entire app as a joke, but we’re in the age of enthusiastic programming, and people are always trying to fool journalists. If he’s already pulled a joke on Google, what if TechCrunch is the next target of this bizarrely simple 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 he was selling fidget spinners on the playground?

My suspicions were not at all unfounded. When I searched for Jane’s previous company – Mediababy, formerly known as Poybo – the testimonials and press clippings on the site were questionable. I asked one of the journalists quoted on Mediababy if their testimony was real, and they had no idea what I was talking about. This is probably just a sign of the growth of a young founder penetrating too close to the sun, but it rubbed me the wrong way.

I’m starting to feel like the Baby Sylvia meme, driving me crazy, finding irrelevant pieces of evidence I can connect to prove a point. The launch video even includes a short clip of the Rickroll meme, so could that be a sign?

$1,234,567 worth of Giggles had been raised by 1k(x), so I reached out to some of the 1k(x) investors to confirm their participation, even though I had already emailed the company’s head of marketing. Some scammers have spoofed TechCrunch’s domain to target founders – what if Gene had done the same? By this moment, I couldn’t trust anyone!

I ended up getting confirmation from 1k(x) that this deal is real. I also had dinner and went out. And then I felt really silly sending those direct messages on LinkedIn. (You have to admit, those fake certificates are weird though.)

Normally, I wouldn’t enjoy indulging myself in devoting half an article about a startup to my boundless anxiety. But in Giggles’ case, it kind of makes sense. It reminded me of something Gene told me when we talked.

“I have a feeling that bots are taking over social media platforms, and because our current advertising model for them is likes and impressions… I think bots are going to be a big problem,” he said. “I think people deliberating and guessing what is widespread creates this downstream effect of actually organizing information.”

The next generation of social media apps must be built knowing that they will be filled with AI-generated content and suspicious bot behavior. The promise of social media is to use the Internet to bring people together, yet we are approaching an age where we will no longer be able to find each other in the midst of all this decline. No wonder Generation Jane took a particularly nihilistic approach to humor and called their creations Brainrot.

“Everyone can easily create more content, and people are becoming more honest, because you can be anonymous — like, with Facebook or whatever, you’re not going to spread brain rot,” he said. “And honestly, I think a lot of young people are kind of panicking. The world is so weird right now.”

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

“Starting a company is very risky,” he said. “It’s basically a gamble. You’re just trying to bet on yourself and think you’re going to excel at doing the job.”

I asked him if he thought Giggles was gambling.

“I don’t consider it gambling. I think lottery tickets are gambling. I think purely chance things are gambling. These are largely extractive matters,” he said.

At the same time, however, he admits that he is mainly reproducing memcoins – cryptocurrencies based on memes that have no inherent value and are often vulnerable to scams.

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

I can’t tell you that Giggles will actually solve the bot problem and make the internet feel more human by betting cryptocurrency on cerebral memes. But I can at least tell you that Gene will be an interesting founder to watch, and that he’s (probably) not kidding you.