Sam Reynolds
5 min read
In This Article:
Welcome to Asia Morning Briefing, a daily summary of top stories during U.S. hours and an overview of market moves and analysis. For a detailed overview of U.S. markets, see CoinDesk's Crypto Daybook Americas.
South Korea has long been known for its outsized influence on altcoin markets, from the XRP mania that drove a 400% rally last year to the present-day obsession with a token that proudly calls itself USELESS.
The $USELESS phenomenon has ties to South Korean KOLs, Bradley Park, a Seoul-based analyst with DNTV Research, told CoinDesk in an interview.
At the center of everything is Yeomyung, a Korean KOL and liquidity provider who aped into USELESS early, held through a 50% drawdown, and is now sitting on serious paper gains.
“He made big profits during the Trump coin run, and with USELESS, he also earned from [providing liquidity] early on and is now just holding,” Park told CoinDesk. “They’re all just waiting for a CEX listing, because without it, there’s no real way to exit.”
Park tracked Yeomyung’s wallet activity and noted that his early conviction has inspired copy-trading among Korean retail investors. Even wallets tied to insiders on Solana’s Jupiter JUP are holding. The rise of USELESS reflects a broader evolution in Korean market behavior.
“I truly think Korean users in this market are no longer just exit liquidity," he said. "They’re starting to understand the market and are evolving into real global players.”
Another character in this story is Bonk Guy, an early promoter of BONK, who reappeared to tweet enthusiastically about USELESS after the price rebounded, though some Korean traders, including Park, have questioned his sincerity.
“Bonk Guy was the first to shill LetsBONK,” Park said. “But after the price collapsed, he went silent. Now that USELESS is bouncing back, he’s suddenly showing interest again.”
Park pointed to the rise of Hyperliquid, Kaia, and now Solana-based memecoins like USELESS as evidence that Korea is no longer a secondary market.
While XRP’s rally was underpinned by legal clarity in the U.S. and narratives about Trump-era deregulation, USELESS feels less like chaos for chaos’s sake and more like a reflection of where attention, and exhaustion, is flowing in today’s market, Park said.
With no roadmap, no utility, and no pretense of building something bigger, it taps into a kind of memetic disillusionment: a collective shrug at traditional crypto promises, and an ironic bet on nothingness that, paradoxically, appears to be more honest than many tokens claiming to change the world.
