rewrite this title What is Milady? The Edgy Ethereum NFT Community With Vitalik Buterin’s Support – Decrypt

Originating as an NFT community, Milady and its surrounding ecosystem has become one of the most culturally significant groups in Ethereum and crypto as a whole.

Over the years, notable figures have joined or interacted with the community, including the likes of Elon Musk and Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin.

Known for its edgy humor, layers of irony, and cult-like mentality, the Milady community has defied many attempts to decipher what on earth is going on in its self-referential world. At its most broad, the community spans multiple NFT collections, meme coins, global raves, a Minecraft server, and long philosophical texts.

This has led many, including the likes of alt-right political commentator Nicholas Fuentes, to attempt to engage with the community, only to get lost in a maelstrom of memes.

Don’t worry though—over the years, we’ve become experts on the topic. Here’s what you need to know.

What is Milady?

Milady (also referred to as Milady Maker) is an NFT collection created by the Remilia Corporation in August 2021. The profile pictures feature cute Chibi anime style characters with huge glossy eyes, each with an individual “drip” score and grade. It’s believed the Milady character was inspired by Hororo from the anime series “Bottle Fairy.”

While at its core Milady is a profile picture NFT project, the Milady ethos rejects much of what is to be expected of this sector. For starters, to be a Milady you don’t have to buy an NFT—just change your profile picture on X (formerly known as Twitter), sparking the meme that simply changing your profile picture to a Milady will change your life.

Remilia as an ecosystem also includes a quarterly magazine, other derivative NFT projects like Remilio Babies, a record label, and more. While not technically under the Milady umbrella, much of the Remilia ecosystem overlaps with the Milady NFT community—both through its members and cultural approach.

On top of this, there is a Milady Minecraft game server—called Miladycraft—which acts as a social hub for its community members as well as a thoughtful art piece on the state of modern gaming and society.

In December 2024, the Milady Cult Coin (CULT) launched on Ethereum as the official token for the project—after numerous related tokens were launched but never officially endorsed.

This came after six months after a pre-sale that the project’s leaders and community members trolled as a scam. This was done through spamming “Don’t worry about it” to anyone that asked what was happening, followed by a stream of deep-fried AI-generated memes.

But really, Milady is a mindset and a philosophical outlook on life. Much of the Milady ethos comes from the writings of Charlotte Fang, the founder of Remilia Corporation.

Who is Charlotte Fang?

Charlotte Fang is the pseudonymous founder and CEO of Remilia Corporation, and in turn the leader of the Milady Cult. Fang mostly goes by he/him pronouns, but told Decrypt that she/her can be used depending on the “vibe” that you’re feeling.

A series of blog posts on Mirror.xyz have afforded readers a glimpse into the controversial founder’s philosophical and sociological views.

A foundational concept for Fang and the wider Milady community is “network spirituality,” which broadly refers to the cultural connections embedded through internet memes and references—encouraging the embrace of the digital self.

In another blog post titled “The Cancelled Will Inherit the Earth,” Fang philosophizes on the current state of cancel culture. He argues that there will soon be a time where every person with a notable following will have been canceled in some way, leading to the canceled taking over culture.

As such, Fang argues the case for “pre-canceling” yourself, for example, by intentionally saying slurs—he believes this is “punk.” This may explain some of the controversial things that Fang and Milady members have said online. As a result, Fang has become one of the most polarizing founders in crypto—which was further exacerbated by a 2022 controversy.

The Miya controversy

In 2022, the co-founder of DeFi Llama, 0xngmi, exposed Fang as having posted alt-right extremist content under the pseudonym Miya. 0xngmi alleges that under the Miya pseudonym, Fang was posting racist and homophobic content, as well as having inappropriate relationships with minors suffering from eating disorders.

At first, Fang tried to distance himself from Miya, but eventually caved in and admitted his involvement. In an X post, he said that his real views “hold no room for hate” and that he detests abusers and groomers.

Fang explained in a blog post that he ran the account with other contributors between 2019 to 2020 as a “performative identity,” masquerading as an AI writing from a “post-human” world with a “schizotheory” writing style. With this, Fang and the other Miya contributors had a “taste for engaging in problematic content” exploring fringe ideologies until their “logical conclusions as a form of critical satire.”

Miya has now become another pillar of the Milady lore, with cult members embracing the controversy and impact rather than ignoring its relevance. In many ways, the industry-wide cancellation of Fang and the Milady project as a result of the Miya controversy only led Fang’s followers to lean further into the Milady philosophy.

“Woke censorship had its run and made for dreadful culture through the late 2010s, but the undercurrent of revolutionary irreverence will always be cooler than normalizing counter-pressure,” Fang wrote in a blog post almost a year later. “Consider how the first thought anyone who hears about Miya being a LITERAL NAZI ANOREXIA CULT LEADER is: Cool.”

Despite the controversy and wider fall of the NFT market, Milady continues to be culturally relevant in the crypto space. In 2023, Tesla founder Elon Musk posted a Milady meme, causing its price to spike. Then in 2025, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin donned a Milady profile picture in what many believed was a vibe shift as he entered “wartime mode.”

Milady is confusing, controversial, and bizarre—but it’s not something you can ignore.