Crypto-native social apps are still searching for a breakout formula, and Giggles wants to find it by turning virality into a market. According to TechCrunch, and later confirmed publicly by crypto venture firm 1kx, 19-year-old founder Justin Jin has raised $1,234,567 in pre-seed funding for Giggles, a meme-focused prediction market app where users speculate on whether short-form videos will go viral.
A prediction market built around short videos
Giggles blends social video sharing with market mechanics. Users upload short clips, while others allocate “aura points” to content they believe will spread widely online. If a video gains traction and becomes viral, early participants stand to benefit. Jin has described the concept as something between a trading app and TikTok.
The app remains invite-only for now, but its waitlist has reportedly reached 450,000 users. Over time, the company plans to convert aura points into real cryptocurrency, a move that could place Giggles in more direct competition with prediction platforms such as Kalshi.
A teenage founder with audience-building experience
Jin, born on October 5, 2006, in Vancouver and now based in San Francisco, reportedly left Babson College to build Giggles with co-founder Edwin Wang. The two had previously worked together on a Minecraft marketplace project that was eventually shut down for violating monetization rules.
He is not new to internet audiences. Between 2020 and 2022, Jin ran a Minecraft YouTube channel called 50mMidas, and his media ventures generated billions of views. He also founded Mediababy, formerly known as Poybo Media, a Gen Z-focused media production and marketing company that was later acquired for about $3.8 million.
From a joke landing page to a funded startup
Giggles began in 2023 as a fake landing page created to mock rumors of a TikTok ban. Styled like a Google product, the page spread on TikTok and drew 100,000 visits in a single day. Jin later turned the joke into an actual product.
In a public message congratulating Jin, Wang, and their eight-person team, 1kx described Giggles as an intriguing design space at the intersection of social behavior, market design, and crypto-based coordination. The investment thesis is straightforward: users may be able to buy into content early and capture upside as it spreads across the internet.
High risk, crowded category
Jin has characterized Giggles as a high-risk but non-exploitative product. He acknowledged the resemblance to gambling because users are effectively betting on outcomes, but argued it differs from a lottery because the underlying content still offers entertainment and informational value.
The platform is aimed at Gen Z and Gen Alpha users, audiences often drawn to absurd and chaotic short-form content. Jin’s stated ambition is to build the first crypto-based app where users spend more than 30 minutes per day, while also using market dynamics to filter out bots, AI-generated posts, and low-quality content.
Still, Giggles is entering a crowded field. Prediction markets have gained renewed visibility from high-profile political betting cycles, while meme-driven speculation remains a familiar force in crypto retail markets. By combining both into a social product, Giggles is betting that attention itself can become a tradable layer of the internet.