Pokémon Promotes Memecoin Ahead Of Championships

It’s about to be a big weekend for Pokémon fans as the annual World Championships tournament is set to begin in San Francisco. While you might expect the franchise to be promoting the event on social media this week, you probably weren’t expecting to see a promotion for a Pokémon-themed crypto memecoin go out on official channels a day before the event as well.

The official Pokémon X account posted that it would be celebrating the series’ 30th anniversary in “a whole new way,” and introduced $POKEMON, the “official” Pokémon memecoin. The post included a lengthy contract address and a link to the series’ official 30th-anniversary website. While I’m not a crypto bro who’s about to try to verify this on my own, we did reach out to The Pokémon Company for comment on the situation to see if this is an official (but incredibly out-of-character) promotion or if the X account has been hacked. The post notably doesn’t show up on any of the company’s other social media accounts, adding fuel to the theory that this is some kind of hack. We’ll update this story if we hear back.

Update: 8/27/26, 6:22 p.m. ET: The Pokémon Company has put out a statement confirming that the account was, indeed, hacked.