Two software engineers just out-earned a celebrity creator through crypto speculation — without ever creating the token themselves.
Here’s the numbers: the $GAS token trades at a $232K market cap, while $RALPH sits at $525K. Meanwhile, $MRBEAST — a token for one of the biggest creators on the planet — has generated over $1.3 million in fees. But MrBeast himself hasn’t earned a dollar from it. When the token was created, the launcher chose to route 100% of royalties to himself: Finn Bags, the CEO of BAGS.fm.
Something strange is happening. Software engineers, of all people, are becoming viable speculation targets. Strangers launch tokens pegged to them, trade them on Solana, and choose to route 99% of trading fees directly to the engineer’s wallet. They’re getting paid for speculation they didn’t initiate. And they’re using the proceeds to fund open source projects that anyone can use.
The Mechanism
The platform is called BAGS.fm and it runs on Solana. Here’s how it works for people who’ve never touched a memecoin:
BAGS creates fungible tokens — standard SPL tokens on Solana, the same technology behind regular cryptocurrencies like USDC or Solana itself. These aren’t NFTs or digital collectibles. They’re tradeable coins that anyone can buy and sell on decentralized exchanges.
Here’s the flow: someone launches a token pegged to you. They upload a logo, pick a ticker like $GAS or $RALPH, and the token goes live. No coding required. Anyone can trade it. Every trade generates a fee. And the creator decides who receives the royalties — they can route 99% to you, or keep it all for themselves. The person who launched the token earns 1% either way.
The technical backbone is Meteora’s Dynamic Bonding Curve (DBC), a smart contract that handles token creation and automated market making. The fees flow through automatically. You don’t need to claim them manually.
This is the ‘Get Bagged’ feature in action. Anyone can launch a coin using your content without your permission. The creator chooses where the royalties go. Steve and Geoffrey didn’t create their tokens — strangers did. But those strangers chose to route the fees to them. The market speculates on them. They get paid because the token creator decided they should.
The trade-off is volatility. You’re no longer just a developer. You’re a living market. But for some, that trade-off makes sense.
Steve Yegge: The Phishing Scam
Yegge spent decades building large-scale systems at Google and Amazon. Recently, he started work on Gas Town — an AI-powered ‘code factory’ intended to let individual developers rival what corporate teams can build.
Someone else launched the $GAS token. Not Yegge. A stranger. Then the notifications started. BAGS.fm was sending him alerts about trading activity. He ignored them for weeks. He figured they were phishing scams.
They weren’t. The token was trading. Users were buying and selling based on speculation about Gas Town’s success. And the fees — 99% of them — were accumulating in his wallet because he’d verified his identity as the real Steve Yegge. By the time he realized what was happening, he’d already earned roughly $360,000 in total — approximately $800 per hour since the token launched on January 6th. That’s passive income from work he never asked to be monetized.
His take? This is the ‘creator stock market.’ Speculate on people, not just companies. And if you’re building something valuable, that speculation funds the work directly — even if someone else created the market.
Geoffrey Huntley: The Walking Financial Instrument
Geoffrey Huntley is a different story. He’s spent years building open source tooling and has been openly skeptical of crypto and NFTs in the past.
Someone else created a $RALPH token pegged to him anyway. Not Huntley. He didn’t press any buttons. But he verified his identity, and the system routed 99% of trading fees to his wallet. Since the token launched on January 5th, he’s earned roughly $320,000 — approximately $675 per hour, 24/7. You can follow the experiment at ralphcoin.org.
Huntley responded with unusual candor. He acknowledged he’s now a ‘walking, talking financial instrument.’ But he’s chosen to lean into it. He’s using the funds to stay independent of venture capital — no board seats, no investor pressure, no timelines imposed by people who don’t understand the work.
Part of his strategy involves using the fees to buy back $RALPH tokens, supporting liquidity for traders. The man who once dismissed crypto is now actively managing his own token economy — one he never created. He even created a GitHub repository for the project.
The Open Source Funding Problem
Open source has always been a public good funded by scraps. GitHub Sponsors. Patreon. Occasional consulting contracts. Most maintainers work on nights and weekends, funded by whatever day job pays the bills.
The problem is structural. As I wrote in The AI Blind Spot, even successful projects like Tailwind struggle to convert adoption into sustainable revenue. Their sponsorship program reached $800k ARR—but required months of cold outreach and manual sales work. Sponsorships are donations, not products. They don’t scale.
VC funding exists but comes with strings. Equity dilution. Board seats. Pressure to build something commercially viable rather than something genuinely useful. The incentives rarely align with the public good nature of open source.
This model is different. Speculation itself becomes the funding mechanism. The traders gambling on your token? They’re the new patrons of open source. Their degenspiration extracts value from nothing — but that extraction routes value to you instead.
You don’t need to convince a venture firm you’re worth funding. You just need to build something people believe in. The market decides.
The Trade-Offs
This isn’t for everyone. The volatility is extreme. Your funding can swing dramatically based on market sentiment rather than the actual value you’re creating. You’re exposed to a world of traders who may not understand or care about your project — they just want to make a bet.
Huntley captures this tension explicitly. He’s honest about being a financial instrument now. The price of his token reflects more than his technical work. It reflects speculation, sentiment, and the chaos of crypto markets.
But for some creators, this works. Yegge sees it as a scalable alternative to the stock market — a way for independent developers to fund ambitious projects without corporate structures. The money is real. The freedom is real. And if the volatility kills you, it kills you.
What’s Next
This is an experiment in progress. Two engineers, two very different projects, hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding from nowhere.
The broader question is whether this scales. Can other creators follow this model? Does it work for people without Yegge’s or Huntley’s reputations? Will the SEC eventually intervene, or does this fall into some regulatory gray zone?
The answers will emerge. But the direction is clear: public goods funded by the very speculation that usually extracts value from them. Traders bet on creators. Creators build things anyone can use. The market exhaust becomes the product.
I’m available for hire as fractional CTO. I help companies build agentic systems. If that’s interesting, reach out.