In a bizarre twist of events, Jeffy Yu, the 22-year-old creator of Zerebro who was rumoured to have taken his own life on livestream, was found alive days after in his parent's home.

On the day of his apparent suicide, Yu released a LLJEFFY token. Following his fake death, the token experienced a meteoric 2,000% surge before crashing.

Yu was discovered on Wednesday by a journalist from the San Francisco Standard, who located him at his parents’ home.

Wearing flip-flops and visibly startled, Yu reportedly expressed frustration about being “doxxed” and “harassed,” stating that the attention had now forced his parents to consider moving.

Viral Hoax Fuels Market Frenzy

Over the weekend, a now-deleted video circulated on X (formerly Twitter), showing Yu smoking a cigarette before seemingly taking his own life on camera.

Accompanying the video was a pre-scheduled blog post in which Yu waxed philosophical about fame, mortality, and “legacoins”—his term for meme coins that serve as digital legacies.

The dramatic stunt catapulted $LLJEFFY, a Solana-based token, to a market cap of nearly $105 million, surging over 2,100% in just hours.

The hype was fueled further by a published obituary on Legacy.com—sourced from the San Francisco Chronicle—describing Yu as a “visionary artist, technologist, and cultural force.”

That obituary was later taken down due to lack of confirmation from official sources.

But skepticism quickly spread. Blockchain analysts noticed the deployer wallet—believed to be connected to Yu—was actively buying up the token despite his reported death.

Confidence collapsed, and the token plummeted nearly 87% within an hour, bottoming out at a $13.8 million market cap.

No Records of Death

Decrypt confirmed with the San Francisco and San Mateo Coroner’s Offices that no deaths matching Yu’s name or profile had been recorded in the region since April 2.

These findings aligned with growing suspicions that the entire incident had been a staged publicity stunt.

Extreme antics in the meme coin space aren’t new. Past episodes include developers faking drug overdoses or even self-immolation on livestreams to hype tokens.

The platform Pump.fun, a popular tool for meme coin launches, eventually banned livestream promotions after one fake suicide hoax went viral.

Decrypt has reached out to Jeffy Yu for comment. As of now, he has not publicly addressed the fallout or clarified the intent behind the hoax.