Soulja Boy’s Crypto Apology: A Cautionary Tale in the Wild West of Digital Assets

Celebrity endorsements in crypto just hit a sour note. Rapper Soulja Boy's recent public apology for promoting questionable NFT and cryptocurrency projects has sent shockwaves through the digital asset community, highlighting the persistent risks lurking at the intersection of fame and finance.

The High-Stakes Hype Cycle

It's a familiar pattern: a famous face tweets, a token pumps, and retail investors rush in. The mechanism is simple—borrowed credibility meets speculative frenzy. But when the music stops, as Soulja Boy's statement suggests it did, the fallout lands squarely on those who bought the hype. It's a brutal reminder that in crypto, influencer marketing isn't just advertising; it's a volatility trigger.

Navigating the Unregulated Frontier

This incident underscores the sector's ongoing growing pains. Without the guardrails of traditional financial regulation, the burden of due diligence falls entirely on the individual. Projects can promise the moon, backed by little more than a celebrity meme and a slick website. The resulting landscape is a minefield for the uninformed, where distinguishing innovation from illusion requires more savvy than most possess. It's almost enough to make you nostalgic for the boring, predictable scams of old-school finance.

A Watershed Moment for Accountability?

Soulja Boy's mea culpa could mark a turning point. As legal scrutiny around promotional practices intensifies, the era of consequence-free shilling may be closing. The real test will be whether this leads to more substantive change—like creators vetting projects with the same rigor they'd apply to a brand deal—or if it's merely a PR speed bump on the road to the next pump-and-dump. One thing's clear: in the rush to the future of money, some are still playing by the oldest rules in the book.

ZachXBT listed 5 scam projects promoted by Soulja Boy

According to ZachXBT’s X thread in April 2023, Soulja Boy promoted crypto and NFT drops at least 73 times since March 2021. The investigator said 16 of the NFT collections lauded by the rapper later became scams or failed ventures, Cryptopolitan reported.

One of the cited examples was a token known as RAPDOGE, which Soulja Boy had mentioned severally in mid-2021. “On July 19, 2021, Soulja Boy Tweeted out: “let’s pump $RAPDOGE to $.000001 and let’s get all our friends in on this, are you with me lilyachty” In the following hours the project rug pulled after receiving shills from Lil Yachty and Quavo as well,” the investigator wrote.

The RAPDOGE token has since become defunct, and investors suffered losses after liquidity was withdrawn shortly after the promotional push.

ZachXBT also talked about Soulja Boy’s tussle with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which had filed a complaint accusing him and several other celebrities of unlawfully promoting tronix (TRX) and BitTorrent (BTT).

The SEC alleged that the promotions failed to disclose the rapper had been compensated for endorsing the tokens, alongside actor Lindsay Lohan, WWE athlete and influencer Jake Paul, artists Akon and Ne-Yo.

Two projects known as Orion and The Life Token were also part of Soulja Boy’s cake, which he allegedly used for charitable causes.

“Orion & The Life Token, these two projects used cancer and suicide prevention charities as a means to pump the price. Within one month of the shill Orion, rugged and Twitter was deleted. The Life Token was abandoned in early 2022,” ZachXBT surmised.

Soulja Boy promoted a different project called Flokinomics that fraudulently claimed to be connected to Elon Musk and paid for media promotion to make it look real, but its liquidity was eventually taken away. Per ZachXBT’s estimates, the “Superman” rapper earned more than $730,000 from crypto and NFT promotions during the period under review.

Celebrity gets cleared from 2-year long Cryptozoo court case  

There have been several famous names mentioned alongside failed crypto projects within the last year, but perhaps the most talked about was Logan Paul’s Cryptozoo frenzy. The WWE superstar and online personality closed the chapter on the defunct NFT project legal dispute after a US district judge upheld the dismissal of a class action lawsuit accusing him of misleading investors. 

The lawsuit, filed in 2023, alleged that Paul and his associates promoted an NFT-based game that promised profits through breeding and trading digital animals. The project never completely got off the ground, which led to claims that investors were lied to and that the effort was a “rug pull.”

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