Propose an edit: LA Vape Cabal

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The **LA Vape Cabal** is the community coined name for an informal circle of Los Angeles based crypto influencers, traders and content creators whose collaborative streams and overlapping projects made them one of the most influential and most argued about cliques in Solana meme coin culture. The group was never a formal organization: the roster is drawn by the community, the name was applied from outside, and its members have alternately embraced and shrugged at it. At its peak the label functioned the way "the cool kids' table" does anywhere: a shorthand for a small set of accounts whose group streams, calls and inside jokes could move attention, and therefore markets, across [[the trenches]].

## Origins and membership

Coverage traces the group's crystallization to a Texas Hold'em poker livestream organized by [[Threadguy]], the broadcast credited with launching his streaming career. The poker events drew the circle together on camera: reporting names [[FaZe Banks]], [[Frank DeGods]], Malcolm of deLabs (the studio behind DeGods) and the streamers [[rasmr]] and OGShoots as members of the circle, with guests at the poker table including [[Ansem]], Macdegods, Based16z, [[Bitboy]] and [[Minh]]. In March 2024 members including Banks and Frank organized a shared account known as "Probably Nothing." The roster has always been fuzzy at the edges: adjacent Los Angeles streamers such as [[SolJakey]] appear constantly in the same casts and productions, and one community "mini movie" cast list ran from rasmr and Threadguy through SolJakey and [[Jack Duval|Duval]], illustrating how the wider LA streamer scene overlaps the cabal without hard boundaries.

## The streams

The group's stream collaborations became events in their own right: the poker broadcasts, joint trading and reaction streams, and the interview circuit its members ran through 2025 and 2026, including Threadguy's interviews with figures from [[Alon]] to Solana leadership, and the [[FaZe Banks]] streams whose storytelling segments could set the whole timeline's agenda, most famously the [[Kimchi]] folklore wave of August 2026. For a stretch of 2024 and 2025 a large share of what crypto Twitter watched, quoted and clipped originated within this one social circle, and its members' portraits of each other ("Kimchi is folklore," the [[Cupsey]] lore, the endless poker table clips) became trench canon.

## Influence and accusations

The same concentration of attention made the group a lightning rod. Critics accused the circle of coordinating attention to farm their own audiences, with the phrase "exit liquidity" recurring in community criticism of KOL led coin pushes. The accusations peaked around the [[LIBRA scandal]] in February 2025, when rumors circulated that members had advance knowledge of the launch; reporting by The Defiant noted the rumors explicitly came with no proof, and Frank DeGods denied wrongdoing directly: "I'm not 'on the run'. There are no investigations, because I have never done anything illegal." Several members nonetheless took social media breaks in the scandal's aftermath, and the episode permanently attached an insider suspicion narrative to the group's name in community discourse. Later community criticism transferred the frame to new targets: one widely shared 2026 post argued that "[[fomo]] is basically the LA vape cabal rebranded as professionalism," attributing the claim to the platform's sponsored streamer circle.

## Cultural footprint

The name itself became a meme unit. When Mark Zuckerberg asked a crypto question on a podcast, the trader [[Hsaka]] joked that he "definitely dropped a 'watch this' text to his la vape cabal nephew," a post that drew close to a thousand likes on the name recognition alone. By mid 2026 the group's era was being periodized in real time: one popular post lamented that crypto Twitter had "replaced the LA vape cabal with the fortnite drill gooner gang," marking the generational handoff from the cabal's poker table era to the Fortnite pro wave of trench streamers. The group's arc also tracked its members' individual arcs: Frank DeGods announced his departure as DeGods CEO on May 12, 2025 ("My chapter is closing, but the story isn't over"), and Threadguy's periodic disappearances from streaming drew their own news cycle coverage.

## References

- https://thedefiant.io/news/nfts-and-web3/la-vape-cabal-member-announces-departure-from-degods-nft-project
- https://www.chaincatcher.com/en/article/2190346
- https://www.odaily.news/en/post/5202213
- https://www.aicoin.com/en/article/446809
- https://x.com/HsakaTrades/status/1884702421986796029
- https://x.com/NFTwap/status/2050064829210313055
- https://x.com/Nofelinesss/status/2083471018601963686
- https://x.com/starb0ySOL/status/2073762021082808581

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