​​Carlos Ramirez spent fifteen years chasing down anyone who used his drawing without asking, and then licensed it to a memecoin 😏

He drew Trollface in MS Paint in September 2008, an 18-year-old in Oakland making a comic about how pointless trolling was on 4chan. The face escaped the comic almost immediately and became the symbol of the thing it was mocking. He registered the copyright in 2010 and defended it seriously: Hot Topic paid to put it on shirts, and in 2015 a takedown notice from him got Meme Run pulled off the Nintendo eShop while the game was sitting at number five on the store.

$TROLL started as a token nobody officially ran, and the community took it over from there. Ramirez had already said publicly he wouldn't take legal action, but the holders went to him anyway, because an exchange listing is easier with paperwork than without it. He turned down their first offer of $50K. What closed instead was a six-figure deal funded by around ten large holders pooling SOL together, giving $TROLL an exclusive worldwide licence to Trollface across crypto and merchandise, with Ramirez keeping 11% of net merch revenue.

That licence is part of why the token sits on Coinbase today. Exchanges are wary of listing anything built on somebody else's intellectual property, and $TROLL is one of the very few that can point to paperwork. The contract has since been renounced so nobody can change how it works, and practically the whole 1B supply is already circulating.

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