As Chill Guy Meme Goes Viral, Its Creator Is Threatening Legal Action

A new meme has landed—well, sort of.

Last year, its creator, Phillip Bankss, introduced the Chill Guy character on Bluesky, and now it’s finally taking off.

In October 2023, Bankss described the character on Bluesky, writing: “My new character. His whole deal is he’s a chill guy that lowkey doesn’t give a fuck.”

The meme made its way to X as well. “[N]o relationship, no situationship, no talking stage, no sneaky link. i’m just a chill guy,” a tweet alongside the memeified Chill Guy reads.

But now that his character has taken off, the internet has turned the viral “just a chill guy” into a memecoin, called ChillGuy. CoinTelegraph reports that the token launched on Nov. 15 to the Solana network, and, at one point, surged to a $580 million market capitalization. At the time of writing, the memecoin was trading at $.50 and had a market cap of $531 million, per CoinMarketCap.

The creator wasn’t too happy that his character was transformed into a memecoin and said he would pursue legal action against those using his art without permission.

“Just putting it out there, chill guy has been copyrighted,” he tweeted this week, per CoinTelegraph. “Like, legally. I’ll be issuing takedowns on for-profit related things over the next few days.”

He added in a follow-up tweet, “Not like brand accounts using him as a trend, that’s kinda something i dont really care about (i do just ask for credit. or xboxes.) mainly unauthorized merchandise and shitcoins.”

Check out some of the best versions of Chill Guy below.