This past Thursday, I was scrolling through my Instagram to see a post with Floyd Mayweather with couple hundred thousand in cash on a table in front of him on a private jet. Nothing out of the ordinary, until I read the caption: "Champion Predictions: I'm gonna make a $hit t$n of money on August 26th. I'm gonna make a $hit t$n of money on August 2nd on the Stox.com ICO. # TMT # STOX # MAYWEATHER # TBE # CRYPTO # CRYPTOCURRENCY # BLOCKCHAIN # ETHEREUM # BITCOIN"
My jaw dropped after seeing that line, he just clearly posted to his 16 million+ followers that they should be investing in this ICO. Techcrunch wrote an article on it, and their title summed it up perfectly: Dear Floyd Mayweather, you’re why the SEC exists. Tech crunch is completely right about that, Floyd using his Instagram to pump the ICO through the roof. This is very reckless of Floyd and has the possibility to inflict irreversible financial damage on his fans and followers. There's a reason the SEC exists, to protect small investors, like Floyd's fans.
Now weather Floyd's intentions here were to "pump and dump", isn't clear, but by the rule book this is about as textbook "pump and dump" as it gets. Given the stage that Floyd is now on, with the McGregor v. Mayweather fight coming up, it's even worse, since he is in the middle of the spotlight right now. This isn't the first time a celebrity has pumped up a security before. Back in 2011, 50 Cent urged his 3.8 million Twitter followers at the time to buy the stock of a microscopic company in Florida. The penny stock jumped 290% the Monday following the tweet that read, "HNHI is the stock symbol for TVG there launching 15 different products. they are no joke get in now." It wasn't too long after that tweet was posted, that is was taken down and then 50 Cent posted some cautious notes regarding investing in it. There's a good chance one of his lawyers told him what he was doing could get him in deep trouble with the SEC. I'm shocked that Floyd's lawyers haven't urged him to take this down or post some cautionary notes about investing in ICO's. Especially after we recently saw the SEC rule that tokens in the DAO ICO are securities. It will be interesting to see how the Stox.com ICO plays out. It is set to go live on August 2nd, which is right here. It wouldn't surprise me to see many people get burned by this ICO. Stox.com's goal is to build a prediction market off the ethereum based platform.
Overall this post by Floyd just exposed millions of people who have never heard of cryptocurrency to it. This is a double edged sword. For one, blockchain technology keeps getting more exposure, which is helping it mature. But now you are going to have more people throwing their money at a technology they simply just don't understand. Many people will get burned by the fallout produced as cryptocurrency get's more mainstream. In my first article, I discussed how cryptocurrency is still in the early adopters stage. That time is clearly coming to end very soon and as we see the crypto to fiat conversion become easier, we will see money poor into crypto on another level we haven't seen before.
If you are going to invest in cryptocurrency, make sure you understand what you are investing in and the technology behind it. There are good projects out there with real use cases, but there are also a bunch of shitcoins.
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Disclaimer: this is not investment advice, always do your own research. It is very important to do your own analysis before making any investment based on your own personal circumstances.
