Celebrities Promoting Crypto/NFTs is Almost Always Bad

about 3 years ago

Don't get me wrong, I want more people to get into cryptocurrencies and NFTs. Celebrities often promote the wrong ones because they're getting paid. I'd go as far as saying that 99% of the time when someone like Floyd Mayweather tweets about crypto, it's promoting some kind of scam.

EthereumMax Lawsuit

EthereumMax EMAX is a token built on Ethereum that got a lot of attention last year. This was largely in part to Kim Kardashian, Floyd Mayweather, and Paul Pierce promoting it on social media. It was advertised as the "Ethereum killer" as a lot of different cryptos have been. Floyd "Money" Mayweather is no stranger to promoting cryptocurrencies and has even been fined by the SEC for promoting without disclosing that he was paid. He was all over ICOs or Initial Coin Offerings. Imagine that - if people knew you were paid to promote something, odds are they wouldn't invest in it. It's technically illegal to advertise something that you were paid for without letting people know that it's a paid advertisement. These 3 particular celebrities finally got sued for promoting EthereumMax.

source

That's Mr. Money himself wearing an EthereumMax shirt and hat. Look at that smile. That's the smile of someone that probably got paid millions of dollars worth of tokens to promote this shit. He was probably laughing his way to the bank after selling and watching the token fall 99.9% from its all time high price. I tried really hard to hunt down a wallet connected to him so I could get an idea of how much he's been paid but I didn't get very far. Turns out he has enough sense to not make his Ethereum address public because he knows 99% of the shit is scams. At least Kim Kardashian lets people know that it's an ad I guess...

Then you've got Paul Pierce literally just saying "EthereumMax made me so rich I don't need ESPN to pay me anymore". Imagine being a crypto newbie buying this trash because a celebrity tweeted about it and now you're stuck holding a bag of worthless tokens. Not a great experience. This kinda shit really makes crypto look bad to outsiders. Obviously there are scams that happen with cash, but people aren't going to think cash is evil is someone gets scammed with it. Crypto on the other hand, is still very new and it's very easy for someone to say "crypto is a scam" after seeing something like this. It doesn't take a genius to do some basic research and figure out that this is a scam. People are just used to being protected from scams by regulators so you know... Maybe there does need to be some kind of regulation on promoting cryptocurrency investments. I'm all about freedom but damn, seeing people get scammed by people that are already rich is just disgusting. This has also become increasingly popular with NFTs. Watch out.