🤑 Celebs Scam Just Like The Rest Of Us

You no doubt saw the ads all over this year's Super Bowl: celebrities pushing crypto. Larry David did it, just like LeBron James, Kim Kardashian, and many others. But now that the music has stopped in the crypto market, those same celebrities that were giving an implicit (or even an explicit) stamp of approval on the investment, are suddenly silent — even when they had made enormous profits from their involvement in the crypto product, sometimes even stakeholders too.

• “You have this shameless profiteering from celebrities and others, who aren’t at all disinterested or impartial,” former SEC Internet Enforcement chief John Reed Stark said. “There is a lot of potential for harm.”

Failure To Disclose

As the New York Times details, promoting cryptocurrencies and/or NFTs occupies a legal gray zone as federal law requires anyone marketing a security to disclose conflicts of interest — however, crypto isn't (yet?) defined as a security. This has led to example after example of a celebrity who has endorsed a specific cryptocurrency or NFT, only to reveal later (after people have lost tons of money) that the celebrity had some personal/financial ties to the token.

The Verdict

It takes a crash of a market to expose its flaws, and this crash is exposing many major concerns in the crypto market. As we've said here week after week, it’s an urgent matter that the crypto market become regulated.