Celebrities Don't Engage in Dark Cuts: Is Jenner's New Coin Release a Monetization of Influence or Malicious Harvesting?
Holding the "arbitrary manipulation of coin price power," more celebrities are getting involved in the pump, and users need to be wary of scams.Author: Nan Zhi, Odaily Planet Daily
Yesterday, Caitlyn Jenner, the stepfather of the Kardashians, released the Pump token JENNER. At that time, most users believed it was a hacker stealing accounts. Subsequently, many twists and turns occurred, and the token's market value once surged to $40 million.
While the community continued to focus on JENNER, around 2 AM today, Caitlyn Jenner unexpectedly released a new Pump token BBARK. After the announcement, JENNER plummeted from $0.027 to $0.011, a drop of about 60%.
In fact, before Jenner released the pump link, the token had already been mostly sold out in the internal market, with the top ten addresses holding 49% of the tokens. Due to the precedent set by JENNER, many users targeted the token at launch, causing the market value to rise directly from $70,000 to $5 million after trading began.
In just over ten minutes, the trading volume reached $20 million, but the token price showed no signs of rising.
Through some data websites, it can be seen that large holders who purchased in the internal market continued to sell, with each address making hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit.
Subsequently, Jenner posted a new tweet, which included the phrase "not just my own token," implying that the newly released token BBARK was not personally planned and launched by her. However, this tweet did not affect traders, and the token price remained stagnant.
Minutes later, Jenner deleted the previous tweet announcing BBARK, and the token price immediately dropped by 50%. The top holder also cleared 10% of their tokens at once. Following this, Jenner updated the tweet, adding an advertisement label, directly stating that the token was not hers but a promotion for a token issued by another team. An hour after the token launch, Jenner deleted all posts related to BBARK and stated, "That third-party token advertisement has been removed. As I said from the beginning, my only focus is JENNER, and my advertisement confused too many people, which is not worth it."
Since the first deletion, the token's market value has been on a downward trend, falling from $2 million to the current $100,000. Meanwhile, JENNER has started to rebound, recovering 50% of its losses, with a market value reaching $20 million again.
Clear Harvesting?
Assuming this event is a malicious manipulation of the market, the story behind it can be speculated as follows:
- Jenner first used Pump to acquire the majority of the chips;
- Announced the new coin on Twitter, taking advantage of the FOMO sentiment brought by JENNER to make a large profit by selling;
- Caused JENNER to plummet while releasing the new coin, collecting chips at the bottom;
- After completing the profit-taking sale, deleted the new token-related messages, redirecting attention back to JENNER and profiting from the rebound.
Of course, this is merely a speculation from a conspiracy theory perspective; we cannot know the actual facts. However, the extreme distribution and dumping of the new coin, along with multiple deletions of tweets and changes in statements, all suggest that this was not a simple promotion.
Jenner is the first celebrity to use Pump to issue a token. Unlike the situation mentioned in the "Pump PVP Manual" where fake influencers were used for phishing, Jenner is a celebrity who can genuinely monetize her influence. The situation is similar to the peak of NFTs in 2022, where many celebrities began to endorse projects, completing a round of profit harvesting and leaving behind a mess of failed projects.
As a form of attention economy, compared to NFTs, memes are even harder to maintain attention on and generate added value through operation and creation, serving only as a short-term speculative project for users. For example, this morning, rapper Rich The Kid (with approximately 2.4 million followers on X platform) also started his Pump token, which quickly surged but has now dropped to the bottom.
As celebrities join the Pump token issuance ranks, it represents a monetization of influence for them, but for users, the difficulty of making a profit will quickly rise, necessitating vigilance against influence harvesting scams from celebrities.
