In the last few days, deploying a token is one of things mainstream celebrities have done upon entering or reentering into the crypto space. But this handful of celebrities has launched tokens only to see the prices of their respective coins plummet shortly after.
On Sunday, Olympic gold medalist Caitlyn Jenner’s token based on her last name started trading on Solana. One day later, American hip-hop artist Rich The Kid deployed RICH, and by Tuesday, Solana saw Australian rapper Iggy Azalea launch her token MOTHER.
On Wednesday, Nigerian singer-songwriter Davido rolled out DAVIDO through Pump.Fun, Ohio-born rockstar Trippe Redd posted the contract address of his Solana-based token BANDO to X (formerly Twitter), and Jenner launched another token with the same ticker but on Ethereum.
These six tokens from five different mainstream celebrities all have a similar trading pattern: an initial surge in price and then a precipitous drop. Over the past 24 hours, Azalea’s MOTHER token decreased 41%, Rich The Kid’s RICH token slid 52%, while Jenner’s Solana token dropped 67%.
Trippie Redd’s BANDO, which has generated $22.73 million in 24-hour trading volume, is trading at $0.00020 — well below its initial launch price of $0.00047. Jenner’s token on Ethereum is exchanging hands at a price above where it originally started, and yet, in the hours after its rally, which peaked at 12:30 a.m. Thursday, the token’s value has since dropped almost 70%.
While some profited from successfully trading these celebrity tokens, “many traders lost money by trading the celebrity token $JENNER on #Solana, even the trader who previously made $3.7 million in 5 days on [memecoin] $BOME,” wrote crypto analytics sleuth Lookonchain on X. The BOME memecoin trader lost over $133,000 in a day trading JENNER.
Davido-Linked Wallet Offloading During Spaces WIth Ansem
Even though DAVIDO has climbed in the past 24 hours, the token has also shed most of its gains. The token was trading near a penny around 6 p.m. EST on Wednesday and is currently trading at $0.0029, a 72% decrease.
Lookonchain also pointed out Wednesday night that the wallet address that created DAVIDO on Pump.fun had spent seven SOL worth about $1,190 to acquire nearly 203 million DAVIDO tokens, more than 20% of the entire supply before offloading them in multiple transactions. Per Lookonchain, the DAVIDO deployer address sold 121.88 million tokens for roughly $474,400.
Additionally, while Davido was in a Twitter Spaces with notorious memecoin trader Ansem, which started shortly before 9 p.m. EST Wednesday, the DAVIDO wallet address was swapping DAVIDO for SOL through DEX aggregator Jupiter, per blockchain explorer Solscan.
Insider Activity Surrounding Iggy Azalea’s MOTHER
Davido’s token was not a lone case engaged in suspicious activity. The team behind Bubblemaps, an onchain tooling platform, identified insider activity on Azalea’s MOTHER token. “Insiders bought 20% of the supply at launch, before Iggy Azalea (@IGGYAZALEA) made the announcement, and already dumped $2M,” wrote the team on X Wednesday.
Specifically, one wallet address scooped up 12% of the total supply, nearly 119 million MOTHER tokens, before Azalea announced the token’s contract address on X. The wallet address has since offloaded all of its MOTHER tokens.
Davido, Azalea, Rich The Kid, Trippie Redd, and Caitlyn Jenner launching their own tokens this past week was not the first time mainstream celebrities have promoted a token, nor the first time crypto traders have seen prices on celebrity-associated tokens plunge.
Wale.Moca, an advisor to gaming platform Immutable and identity project Mocaverse, looked at the performance of similar projects and said, “Unsurprisingly, they are all dead, with the majority of them having rugged.”
The U.S. Securities Exchange Commission had pursued legal action against celebrities promoting crypto tokens. For example, in Oct. 2022, the SEC charged Kim Kardashian “for touting on social media a crypto asset security offered and sold by EthereumMax without disclosing the payment she received for the promotion.”
The Bubblemaps team warned that “more celebrity tokens will come,” and urged people to remember “that most of them end up worthless and are often plagued by insider trading.”
