It turns out that Iggy Azalea’s final musical effort, 2023’s “Money Come,” was something of a harbinger. The Australian rapper had experienced what she described as “life-changing” financial success after launching and OnlyFans account in January 2023, where she’d develop and publish “Hotter Than Hell,” a year-long multimedia concept packed with collabs with visual artists and a coffee table book. By fall 2024, Azalea had retired from the music business and was reported to be in the subscription platform’s top 10 creators as estimates surfaced that she’d made as much as $48 million in revenue.
“Yeah, of course there are parts of music that I miss. Sometimes I’ll have the itch be like, I need to get in the studio,” she told ABC’s Nightline. “I don’t want to be a slave to that cycle of promotion, concert, music, industry, politics, having to share more of myself than what I’m comfortable with. It’s one thing to sacrifice those things when it’s just you, but I would also be signing my son up to sacrifice those things.”
The birth of Onyx Carter, whom Azalea shares with rapper Playboy Carti, didn’t just impact her decision to leave the music industry—her son ties directly in to her latest act as a self-described “crypto entrepreneur.” Following a controversy where a scammer launched a crypto token using her name ($IGGY), Azalea launched her own token on the Solana blockchain called Mother Iggy, or $MOTHER. Inspired by her newfound motherhood, she actively worked to distance herself from the “pump and dump” nature of many celebrity cryptocurrencies. To that end, she co-founded Unreal Mobile, where customers can use $MOTHER to purchase phones and monthly cell phone plans, and even launched an online crypto casino called Motherland, which is powered by her $MOTHER token. The casino offers various gambling activities and is part of her larger strategy to build a cohesive community and provide utility for the coin.
“It seemed to me that, especially with meme tokens, they were central to virality, and that really interests me, obviously,” Azalea told ABC’s Nightline. When it comes to virality, she added, “I think I have been pretty successful at it.”
While meme coins are more speculative in nature than better established tokens like Ether or Bitcoin, Azalea seems to be riding the cryptocurrency wave that seems to only trend upward on a long enough timeline. And the inherent chaos indelibly linked to the burgeoning cryptocurrency space doesn’t seem to bother Azalea.
“I think a big part of the last ten years of my life, honestly, have been about getting that control back for me: to be able to navigate my own ship in those ways,” Azalea added. “It feels really good to be able to do it. I’m living the dream. I think I just I like to make a little bit of chaos. I always will.”