Trailing the Rabbit
Tibbir and the Search for Verified Trust
“Crypto and fintech are merging into a single ecosystem. We’re committed to championing the winning protocol in a battle driven by attention, social status, memes, and cutting-edge technology. Our core principle is straightforward: Better money makes life better.”
The above quote is the only succinct official statement from Tibbir. The core community has believed from day one that it is a stealth launch by Ribbit Capital. That belief has been shared far and wide, Altcoinist’s most popular article on the thesis has 1.5 million views and counting. For those not familiar, Tibbir is one of the largest projects in the Virtuals ecosystem, with a dedicated frog army that you will encounter sooner or later if you hang around on CT.
For people on the outside, it is hard to tell what is going on. After seeing the 1000th Gribbit, I found myself falling into the Rabbit hole. After resurfacing and spending half a year digesting the journey, this is my initial report back to those not yet frog-pilled.
The wallet trail
10:18 PM Jan 11 2025 | The first public call from a sniper aping Tibbir.
The post claims that the “Creator wallet is mickym.eth belonging to @mickymalka founder of Ribbit Capital”, along with links to ribbitcap.com and the Tibbir token page on the Virtuals app.
There is a lot going on in this one post. Especially for those of us who do not have systems set up to evaluate every Virtual launch, and lack the time, effort, skill or interest to try to successfully snipe tokens moments after launch. So let’s take our time to replay the trail the way early believers likely found it and do our best to understand and verify each step.
Virtuals is, among other things, a launchpad for tokenized AI agents. Tibbir is one of those launches. Tibbir lives on Base, so related transactions can be seen on BaseScan. On the Tibbir token page on the Virtuals app, there is a link to an Owner address (note that you have to be logged in/connect a wallet to be able to view the address). And here is the transaction on BaseScan where the Owner wallet calls the “Launch” function for the Tibbir token.
Etherscan shows the Ethereum mainnet-side history for that same address. One field on Etherscan is of particular interest, namely: “Funded By”.
To do anything onchain, an ETH wallet needs gas. So a fresh wallet must receive its first ETH from somewhere: a bridge, an exchange, a friend, a deployer setup, whatever. Etherscan’s “Funded By” field is simply a shortcut for that first ETH funding transaction. It asks: who first put gas in this address? The answer to that question for the Owner wallet of Tibbir, is mickym.eth.
Claim 1: The address that launched Tibbir on Base was first funded on Ethereum mainnet by mickym.eth ✅
Mickym.eth is the human-readable ENS name for the wallet. Anyone can pay a small fee to register an alias, so obviously a scammer could have registered that name to attract attention and capital. So next we need to audit the claim that mickym.eth indeed belongs to Micky Malka.
There is no standardized way, as far as I know, to tie an ETH wallet to a person or legal entity in a way that is universally legible to market participants. We are not looking for absolute proof of the relationship between Micky Malka and mickym.eth. Rather, we are looking for social proof, or strong signals that point toward it.
Now, if you just scroll the most recent Ethreum mainnet txs for mickym.eth, one that immediately stands out is the transfer of a CryptoPunk. This is a strong signal as it is a high-value transaction, both in terms of monetary value, and cultural significance. Here is the tx.
At this point probabilities shift. This rules out any scammer who couldn’t afford a CryptoPunk. Also, considering Micky Malka is the Chair and main patron of the Node foundation that now owns the IP for CryptoPunks the claim strengthens further.
The CryptoPunk transaction shifts the probabilities but is still not entirely convincing. The next part of the audit trail is, arguably, the final nail in the coffin for sceptics.
The punk is transferred from mickym.eth to kanbas.eth, and when you follow this trail you find that these two addresses are part of the same “wallet cluster”, including a third wallet named kanbas-vault.eth. You can explore this on your own through app.ens.domains or using Etherscan.
Kanbas.eth is listed as the manager/controller for mickym.eth and as the parent for the vault.
For simplicity we’ll just call it a wallet cluster controlled by the same entity. And this entity owns 24 CryptoPunks, stored in the kanbas-vault.eth wallet. The collection includes an Ape (bought for 1011 ETH!) and a Zombie (420 ETH!). Also, one item in the collection is punk #2300, which happens to be Micky Malkas profile picture on X.
Game, set and match.
Claim 2: mickym.eth belongs to @mickymalka, founder of Ribbit Capital ✅
But what does it actually do?
Ribbit Capital is not necessarily familiar to most people in Crypto. There isn't a lot of information out there about Ribbit. The founder Micky Malka seems to prefer to stay out of the spotlight. But they are one of the most successful and influential VCs in Crypto and Fintech, recently ranked no. 4 in the crypto VC category by Fortune.
If you want to “get to know Micky”, here are some good interviews:
And if you want to learn more about Ribbit Capital, you should definitely read through the various letters they have published on their website. Especially the Bitcoin letter from 2013(!), the identity letter from 2024 and the token letter from 2025.
There is plenty more to say about both Ribbit and Tibbir. And plenty more has already been said by others. This article is focused on giving firm footing to the claim that Tibbir is launched by Ribbit Capital. Yet the obvious question remains, “But what does it actually do?”
I’m not exploring that here, with the intention to leave room for verification, and digestion, of the wallet trail. If you are eager to explore more, the Micky Malka interviews and Ribbit letters are great resources. They serve as an appetizer for the “mumbo jumbo” of the Altcoinist articles. And if you want to take the warp drive, recent posts from beeboop have been connecting new dots and flagging July 29th as a date to keep an eye on.
If you are interested in more from Coinage on Tibbir, a follow-up article is in the works. ← Can remove ofc, but would be fun to do a series
Investment advice in superposition
CT, and retail in general, are starved for both meaning and early entries. As a memecoin like SPX6900 managed to reach a ~$2 billion ATH, it makes sense that Tibbir has been able to catch a bid around the Ribbit narrative. In fact, one could argue, it does not make sense that something like SPX6900 trades 3x higher than Tibbir.
Tibbir was fair-launched: full supply open to everyone from day one, price discovery left entirely to the market with no insider allocation. It took ~3 months before Tibbir left sub-$10m for good, and then continued on a quick and volatile climb to a ~$440m top in late October 2025. Today it’s retraced more than 70% from ATH, trading around $120m.
Nothing and everything on CT is investment advice. Number go up is not sufficient for a network to cohere around. Something more valuable for society has to be offered. Yet number go up is the inevitable hook. I have no credibility to speculate aound price targets, but I find it useful to invoke a crypto-native investment framework to evaluate the potential opportunity here.
Jeff Park has proclaimed that the future belongs to the Ideological Investor. He describes a reorientation of analysis that rewards
“those who understand that value is not solely determined by cash flows or cost of capital, but by the frameworks, or the lack thereof, behind legal, technological, and cultural forces through which societies allocate trust and power.”
Through this lens, Tibbir makes sense. Without having to say anything about what Tibbir does or might do, you can assert that Ribbit are operating at the frontier, in the cracks of existing legal and technological frameworks, whilst skillfully playing with powerful cultural forces.
You can also assert that they have a public track record of backing category winners in the Crypto and Fintech space. According to Micky, Ribbit can be viewed as a startup that deploys capital, deposits ideas and helps build systems and practices.
I struggle to see how Tibbir is not an invitation to place a bet alongside them. So far not many people have taken this bet. Fewer than 10,000 wallets hold more than 1k Tibbir, a position today worth around $120.
In this interview from ~1 year ago Micky states that through their portfolio companies, Ribbit touches 700m monthly users, looking to increase that number to 2 billion over the next decade.
In light of all this, there is certainly a non-zero probability that society, over time, will allocate a considerable amount of trust and power to a protocol launched and governed by Ribbit, anchored to the principle that better money makes life better.