Avalanche Developer, Known for Minting Millionaires and Duds, Is Back With ‘WAGMI’ Tokens

Infamous Avalanche developer Daniele Sestagalli is back with a project whose name seems to spur hopes among crypto traders about fortunes in a nearly flat market.

The new offering called WAGMI, a popular abbreviation of “we are gonna make it,” or a phrase that means to succeed financially, is an apparent rebranding of Sestagalli's Popsicle Finance.

Popsicle's ICE tokens are at the center of Sestagalli’s latest project. As of Wednesday, ICE holders can swap their tokens for WAGMI using a blockchain-based tool. WAGMI so far has a market capitalization of $2 million, Sestagalli tweeted, while ICE tokens have jumped 70% in the past 24 hours.

The restart of WAGMI was announced in July as a platform that would run on multiple blockchains and offer various decentralized finance (DeFi) tools and services to users.

Publicly available technical documents have not revealed the specifics of the project as of Wednesday.

“I’m pretty confident to say that the token economics and the $WAGMI project is my best project ever,” Sestagalli said in a recent tweet. “Not going to lie but damn I’m happy about it whatever the market is made to grow and snowball.”

Sestagalli’s previous Avalanche projects created a cult-like following in the 2021 bull run under the “frog nation” moniker. Most of these projects went live without a presale to venture capitalists, earning early followers several multiples on their capital.

Sestagalli is behind formerly top Avalanche projects like Wonderland, a treasury-backed currency protocol, and Abracadabra, a platform that provides collateral based on yield-bearing assets deposited by users. SPELL, TIME and MIM – three tokens associated with the two projects – had a combined market capitalization of over $6 billion at their peak, data from CoinGecko shows, making Sestagalli one of the most influential developers in the crypto ecosystem at the time.

Popsicle Finance’s ICE, which lets users earn yields on supplying liquidity to trading pairs, reached a $660 million capitalization at its peak. However, the project was hacked for $25 million in mid-2021 – failing to fully recover since.

However, these tokens have been down more than 95% since then, due to a lack of development, a generally bearish market environment, and a lack of interest in alternative currencies.