Chill Guy (CHILLGUY) takes over DEX trading despite copyright warnings from the author of the token’s cartoon

The Chill token trend swept over Raydium, leading to an endless inflow of derivative assets. The Chill Guy remains the OG asset, now becoming the first meme token to be copyrighted as the creator of the art wanted to limit its usage for commercial purposes.

Meme tokens are a free-for-all space, where traders find a mix of originality and copycats. The first Chill Guy (CHILLGUY) token is one of the simple cartoons to gain the attention of the trading community, despite an inflow of close to 50K new Pump.fun tokens daily. 

Chill Guy, however, is not as chill when it comes to stepping on his legal turf. The cartoon dog’s creator, through his X account, warned that he copyrighted the Chill Guy brand, and will be issuing legal challenges to anyone using it for commercial purposes. 

Chill Guy is an original cartoon character by artist Phillip Banks, who has nothing to do with the Solana token launch. Soon after the token’s launch, Banks limited his X exposure and went private, after being flooded with DMs. This did not stop traders from continuing to grow the community, with expectations the token would remain active. 

Chill Guy took the approach of Simon’s Cat, another original character. However, Simon’s Cat did not lead to a wave of derivative tokens, instead becoming a stand-alone meme. Banks said he has nothing against using his images for memes, but he draws the line at ‘unauthorized merchandize and sh*tcoins’. 

In the case of Chill Guy, the cartoon proved too irresistible to token creators, who treated it as any open-source Internet meme, mixing and matching with other token trends. It was the wave of Chill that also displaced Quant (QUANT), the Gen-Z token that ran a revenge pump to teach its creator a lesson. 

The image of Chill Guy, with no mention of the token, was shared by El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, adding meme enthusiasm to his Bitcoin maximalism. 

https://x.com/nayibbukele/status/1859433926206325107

The token even grabbed the attention of Binance, for now just with an emoji comment. Since the token is liquid and active, it is uncertain whether the legal action warnings will stop the token from additional listings. Meme tokens have shown resilience, and have traded even after crashes and rug pulls.  

Before the Chill Guy rally, the Pump.fun account also mentioned the token, giving it further exposure. The image of the human-like dog gained popularity on TikTok, where creators started a trend of calling themselves ‘chill guy’ in front of life’s challenges. 

CHILLGUY stabilizes, Chill brand spreads to new tokens

Pump.fun continues to host dozens of ‘Chill’ new tokens, some still in the bonding curve stage. All of those tokens are also anonymously created, and practically impossible to challenge legally. Some of the new tokens mix several trends – Miladies, AI tokens, and Chill.

The original CHILLGUY token saw some volatility, but did not crash after the legal threats. The asset remains anonymous and trades in a decentralized pool, with $5.1M liquidity locked. CHILLGUY recovered to $0.31, after breaking out from under $0.01. The token retreated to a $322M market cap, after peaking at $500M. 

The threat of legal action worked as a stress test for CHILLGUY, potentially making the token more well-known and resilient. The Chill Guy image continues to gain popularity, both for its social media value, and as related to tokens. 

CHILLGUY briefly flipped MOODENG, and now stands above AI16Z, the AI agent token. The new asset is still in the range between $200M-$500M market capitalization, where multiple tokens compete for attention. The token does not show obvious signs of sniping or insider holdings, with no active token clusters creating fake volumes. 

On the Solana network, CHILLGUY reached an extremely wide adoption, transferring its success on TikTok to the meme space. Within days of the launch, the token is now in more than 111K wallets, far surpassing even older tokens with active communities. One of the reasons is that Solana activity relies on bots to snipe early or trending tokens while they trade for pennies, then wait until they break out with wider adoption.

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