Key Takeaways:
- Justin Jin, 19, raised exactly $1,234,567 from crypto VC 1kx for meme prediction market app Giggles on April 7, 2026.
- Giggles has 450,000 waitlist sign-ups, letting users bet “aura points” on whether short videos will go viral.
- The app plans to convert aura points to real cryptocurrency, putting Giggles in direct competition with platforms like Kalshi.
Crypto VC 1kx Backs 19-Year-Old Founder’s Meme Prediction Market Giggles
According to a Techcrunch exclusive published Tuesday, Justin Jin secured the deliberately meme-formatted figure from lead investor 1kx, a blockchain-focused venture capital firm that confirmed the raise publicly on X.
According to the report, Jin, born October 5, 2006, in Vancouver and now based in San Francisco, dropped out of Babson College to build Giggles alongside co-founder Edwin Wang. The two met years earlier running an in-game Minecraft marketplace that was eventually shut down for violating monetization rules.
Jin is not new to building audiences at scale. He previously ran the Minecraft Youtube channel 50mMidas from 2020 to 2022, accumulating billions of views across his media ventures. He also founded Mediababy, a Gen Z media production and marketing company formerly known as Poybo Media, which was acquired for roughly $3.8 million.
Giggles began in 2023 as a fake landing page Jin built to mock rumors of a Tiktok ban. The page mimicked a Google product and drew 100,000 visits in a single day after spreading across Tiktok. Jin then turned the joke into a working product.
The app combines short-form video feeds with prediction market mechanics. Users post short clips and others invest “aura points” early on content they believe will spread. If a video goes viral, early investors profit. In the report, Jin describes the concept as putting a trading app and Tiktok together.
1kx called Giggles “a compelling new design space at the intersection of social behavior, market design, and crypto-native coordination” in its announcement congratulating Jin, Wang, and their eight-person team.
The app is currently invite-only with approximately 450,000 users on the waitlist. Team members range in age from 19 to 38, with Jin as the youngest. The company plans to convert aura points into real cryptocurrency as the product scales.
Techcrunch’s reporting says that Jin has framed Giggles as high-risk but not extractive. He has compared it to gambling in the sense that users bet on outcomes, but argued it differs from lotteries because the underlying content carries entertainment and informational value.
The app targets a Gen Z and Gen Alpha audience drawn to nihilistic, absurd short-form content often described as “brainrot.” Jin’s stated goal is to build the first crypto-native app where users spend more than 30 minutes per day, while using market mechanics to filter out bots, artificial intelligence (AI)-generated content, and low-quality posts.
Giggles enters a crowded field. Prediction markets such as Kalshi have drawn fresh attention following high-profile political betting cycles, and meme coins continue to attract speculative retail interest. Giggles attempts to merge both categories inside a social media wrapper. 1kx framed its investment as a bet on a new model where users can buy into content early and share in its upside as it spreads across the internet.
Jin’s fundraising announcement also included a Rickroll in the launch video.
