Ansem Launches Site Where Teams Buy His Attention With Airdrops

Crypto influencer Zion "Ansem" Thomas opened ansem.io on Aug. 17, a site where token teams pay for his promotion by giving supply to holders of his memecoin.

The trade replaces the standard influencer deal, in which a team pays social media influencers, known as Key Opinion Leaders, in cash or tokens and the KOL sells into the attention he creates. Here the payment goes to $ANSEM holders and into burning $ANSEM, which Thomas owns most of. He held about 60% of supply as of June, when The Defiant covered a $7 million airdrop aimed at reaching 1 million holders.

$ANSEM traded at $0.303, up 27.5% over 24 hours, with a circulating market cap of $126.19 million and a fully diluted valuation of $302.78 million, according to CoinGecko. Thomas wrote that the token is "trading at 200M+ market cap," a figure between the two measures. Pump.fun's PUMP rose 0.7% to $0.002776.

By 5:19 p.m. ET the site reported 19 coins launched, roughly $211,500 airdropped to 26,700 wallets, 929,647 $ANSEM burned and $103.02 million traded.

Gold and Diamond Badges

Every coin created on the site reserves at least 3% of its supply for $ANSEM holders, bought at the launch price in the same transaction that creates the coin, per the documentation. Teams that also burn $ANSEM get a badge and a higher position on z500, the site's leaderboard. Gold costs 25,000 $ANSEM, about $7,600 at Monday's price. Diamond costs 100,000, about $30,300, and adds a review by Thomas's team before launch day.

Teams get promotion in return. Thomas wrote that "anything even slightly acknowledged by this X account immediately bonds if not sending to multi-million dollar market cap or higher," and said top leaderboard coins will get cross-marketing from his channels and pump.fun's. Teams also reach 145,533 $ANSEM wallets, which he described as "very aggressive marketers on social media."

Thomas wrote that "crypto doesn't need another vanilla token launchpad" and set out why he chose not to build one, citing bonding-curve fees from coins "that go to zero in hours." Every coin created on ansem.io is a pump.fun token, and the site's docs call the product "the launchpad of the $ANSEM community."