BabyDoge's 3 million members take charge of LimeWire and its 8 million monthly users

A brand with 8 million users a month is now part of a token community of more than 3 million people.BabyDoge has bought LimeWire, the file-sharing name that defined downloading in the early 2000s. The agreement was announced on September 14. No financial terms were disclosed. Czupor takes over from the Zehetmayr brothers Julian and Paul Zehetmayr are stepping down as heads of LimeWire. Abel Czupor will assume operational control of the platform with BabyDoge. The brothers bought LimeWire’s intellectual property and relaunched it in 2022 as a music-focused NFT marketplace where fans traded limited editions, unreleased demos, and digital merchandise. “The next chapter is about taking that foundation to a much larger audience and community,” the brothers said. They said they thought Czupor and BabyDoge could keep working on it. Czupor said the platform reaches 8 million users a month. BabyDoge says its ecosystem reaches over 3 million people. This LimeWire has nothing to do with the original Lime Wire LLC or Lime Group LLC, the company that was taken offline in the 2000s due to copyright infringement lawsuits. Czupor’s relaunch centers around creator ownership and decentralized storage, as well as AI-powered content tools. He says the internet is “broken” and that “tech giants have monopolized data,” and he wants artists, writers, and researchers to have control over how their work is used. “We’re building a platform where AI serves the creator, not the corporation,” said Czupor. His example is an independent musician who makes an album with AI and puts it out directly to fans on LimeWire, bypassing a record label. The LMWR token stays. BabyDoge’s own token will not supplant it, and the utility token for LimeWire services, such as paying for decentralized file storage and access to the AI tools, is still LMWR. Czupor described BabyDoge not as a corporate parent but as a “DAO-style backer” of the platform’s independence. BABYDOGE trades 94% below its December 2024 peak LMWR fell 19.4% over the week and is down 64.3% since the start of 2026. BABYDOGE is down 11.2% on the week and down 42.7% year to date. The meme coin, launched in 2021 with characteristics borrowed from Dogecoin, once soared 228.3% in a day after Elon Musk posted about it in July 2021. It’s now down about 94% from its peak in December 2024 and has a market cap of ~$64.21 million, making it the 308th largest by value on CoinMarketCap. LMWR’s own history displays the same fade. The token reached a 25-week high of $0.47 in late 2023 after beginning the year close to $0.05, before the cooldown in NFTs and meme coins kicked in.