On Sunday, May 4, Jeffy Yu took his own life on a live stream. On Wednesday, he was hanging out at his parents’ house, alive and well. The San Francisco Chronicle tracked down Yu, the founder of cryptocurrency token Zerebro, who had apparently faked his own death in dramatic fashion and fled in an apparent attempt to both get out of the crypto space and cash in on the attention that the story brought to his crypto projects.
Yu’s staged death was captured on video, which appeared to show him holding a gun to his chin and seemingly pulling the trigger, causing the phone to fall. While it was reported by CryptoSlate that the video was a part of a live stream on the memecoin site Pump.fun, the site denied that such an event occurred on its platform.
Shortly after his apparent death, an obituary for Yu appeared on Legacy.com calling him a “Martyr of Imagination and Creativity,” and describing his life as being “lived with intensity, brilliance, and a devotion to creation that he hoped would inspire others for eternity.” The obituary quickly disappeared from the site and is no longer available.
In addition to the glowing, likely self-authored obituary, Yu also released another self-tribute: a memecoin dedicated to himself that was supposedly launched as a result of his apparent death. “If you’re reading this, it’s because my 72 hour deadman’s switch triggered so i’m not here, at least physically,” the message read. It accompanied the launch of $LLJEFFY, which Yu referred to in his launch message as “an eternal grave in cyberspace.” The coin quickly climbed in value as crypto buyers jumped in.
And then the suspicions started. There was a lot of oddness surrounding Yu’s death from the start, and some started calling into question whether the whole thing was an elaborate stunt. One X user noted that Yu appeared to buy ads on X for the memecoin to get more attention. Blockchain analysis organization BubbleMaps spotted money moving from wallets associated with Yu—first $100,000 moved from his coin Zerebro to LLJEFFY, then another sell-off of $1.4 million worth of Zerebro as the value of the coin started to climb from the attention brought by his death. Per Decrypt, LLJEFFY surged 2,115% after release, reaching a market cap of around $105 million.
By Wednesday, the jig was fully up. The San Francisco Standard found Yu at his parents’ home in the city, and he freaked out. “I’ve been doxxed. I’ve been harassed. If you can find me, other people can find me,” he told the paper. “Now I have to move my parents out of here this week.” Given how much he seemed to have cashed out during his brief time as a ghost, it seems like he should be able to find them someplace nice.
