Uruguayan football star Luis Suarez joined boxer Floyd Mayweather in promoting Stox, a Bancor-based prediction market which opens its Alpha testing phase on August 30.
Luis Suarez Promotes Stox Prediction Market
Suarez, who plays for FC Barcelona and is regarded as one of the best strikers in the world, posted on Instagram that he was excited about the upcoming U.S. Open and invited his 24.2 million followers to sign up for the Stox Alpha to help him “build the best prediction market in the world.”
A post shared by Luis Suarez (
@luissuarez9) on Aug 25, 2017 at 1:40am PDT
Stox, which raised $33 million during its ICO, offers users the opportunity to create prediction markets for a variety of categories and trade the outcome of those events. At the time of writing, the Stox price was $1.87, a daily increase of 19%. This gives Stox a market cap of $55.3 million, placing it 84th among cryptocurrencies.
Celebrities Use Social Media to Pump ICOs
Stox received a lot of press coverage leading up to its early-August crowdsale, thanks to an Instagram post from world-famous boxer Floyd Mayweather. Mayweather, who was squarely in the public eye due to his impending fight with Connor McGregor–which just took place last weekend–told his 18.5 million followers that he was going to make “a $hit t$n of money” on both the fight and the Stox ICO.
Last week, Mayweather again used his social media presence to promote an ICO, this time for decentralized content marketplace Hubii Network. In the post, he told his 7.8 million Twitter followers to call him “Floyd Crypto Mayweather from now on.” This tweet was clearly labeled as an ad, and according to Motherboard, this latter post was organized by the Crypto Media Group, a marketing firm that launched so recently it doesn’t even have a proper website set up yet.
When Mayweather first posted about Stox, many people believed the post was organic and that Mayweather had become the latest celebrity to embrace cryptocurrency. However, this post by Suarez–deployed similarly before an important Stox milestone–leads one to assume that both posts are part of a coordinated marketing campaign.
As cryptocurrency further permeates the mainstream consciousness, promotions like these will likely become commonplace. However, as P.H. Madore wrote in a recent op-ed, investors should remember that “celebrities have a habit of saying what they’re paid to say.” A celebrity endorsement should not be the catalyst that leads you to participate in a crowdsale or establish a position in a new cryptocurrency.