There’s a specific kind of paranoia that comes with covering internet culture in 2026. When TechCrunch reporter Amanda Silberling started investigating Giggles, a new app from 19-year-old founder Justin Jin, she found herself spiraling into genuine doubt about whether the entire thing was an elaborate prank. And honestly, given how it all started, that skepticism wasn’t entirely unreasonable.
Giggles began as a joke. Not a metaphorical joke. An actual meme that Jin posted on TikTok around 2023, when people were desperately seeking alternatives to the platform amid ban rumors. The reference was born from an existing TikTok bit where users would mock stale content by saying someone “got banned from google giggles.” Jin took the bit and ran with it, creating a fake landing page and logo that looked eerily like a real Google product.
The landing page got 100,000 visits in a single day.
So Jin called his friend Edwin Wang (a co-founder he’d met while running a “dubious marketplace” on Minecraft) and they built it for real. This is the actual timeline we’re discussing.
A Trading App Designed to Hack Your Brain
What emerged is something that could only exist in 2026: a platform that sits somewhere between TikTok and Kalshi, where users post “brainrot” videos and invest fake “aura points” in them. Soon, real cryptocurrency. If your meme blows up and you got in early, you profit. Currently in invite-only beta, Giggles has somehow attracted 450,000 signups.
“The goal for us is to be the first crypto app where people spend more than, like, 30 minutes a day on it,” Jin told TechCrunch, according to Silberling’s reporting. “I think once we are able to be that doomscroll feed that’s really well made, it kind of naturally capitalizes on people’s dopamine cycles.”
Let that sink in. The explicit goal is to build a product that exploits psychological dependency while facilitating financial speculation on content. It’s the logical endpoint of what happens when you combine social media fatigue, crypto evangelicalism, and the creative chaos of people who grew up watching Minecraft YouTubers and collecting NFTs.
The fundraise was $1,234,567. Yes, someone actually chose that number.
Why the Paranoia Was Justified
Silberling’s skepticism wasn’t paranoia; it was professional self-preservation. Jin’s previous ventures had some red flags. Mediababy (formerly Poybo) included testimonials and press quotes that, when verified, turned out to be fabricated or confused. One journalist quoted on the site had no idea what the reporter was talking about when asked.
Then there was the fundraise number itself. The launch video included a Rickroll. The entire origin story felt designed to make a journalist question reality. Silberling actually reached out to investors on LinkedIn to verify the deal was real, half-convinced she was being set up for public humiliation.
Eventually she got confirmation from 1k(x) (the lead investor) that Giggles actually exists. But the doubt lingers. And it should.
The Broader Problem Jin Is Actually Onto
What makes this story more than just “weird founder does weird thing” is that Jin has identified a real problem that most people are either ignoring or profiting from quietly. He’s right that bots and AI-generated slop are poisoning social media platforms. He’s right that the current advertising model incentivizes spam and manipulation. He’s right that young people have developed increasingly nihilistic humor as a coping mechanism for living in an internet they can’t trust.
“I have a feeling that bots are taking over these social media platforms, and because our current advertising model for them is getting likes and impressions… I think botting will be a huge problem,” Jin said. “I think people trading and guessing on what’s being viral creates this downstream effect of actually organizing information.”
His solution is to introduce financial incentives as a filtering mechanism. If you’re actually betting on what goes viral instead of just passively scrolling, presumably you’re more invested in accuracy. Theoretically sensible. Practically speaking, he’s describing memecoins with extra steps, a product category famous for rug pulls and zero-sum outcomes.
Jin himself acknowledged this contradiction when pressed. “A lot of people say meme coins are kind of zero-sum, and right now, honestly, maybe they kind of are. But you do see them actually organizing information and giving a lot of entertainment.”
The Real Question
This is where the story stops being funny and starts being instructive. We’re reaching an inflection point where the internet is becoming actively hostile to human interaction. Bots are everywhere. AI slop is drowning out everything else. The platforms designed to connect us are mostly just extracting attention and data. Something has to give.
Whether Giggles is that something, or just another gambling product wrapped in millennial meme aesthetics, is impossible to know right now. What matters is that someone as genuinely weird as Jin saw a problem and built something weird to address it. Not because he’s a visionary. Not because he’s following any playbook. But because the playbook itself has become useless.
Silberling ended her investigation something like 99% confident that Giggles is real and Jin isn’t pranking her. In 2026, that level of certainty about anything on the internet feels like an act of faith rather than journalism.
