decrypt.co
At last weekend's Bitcoin 2021 conference in Miami, boxer Floyd Mayweather took some jabs for his decision to wear a t-shirt of rival cryptocurrency EthereumMax, which people could use to pay for his June 6 fight with Logan Paul.
Suffice it to say, Kim Kardashian West isn't wearing a $20 t-shirt to promote your little-known token. She uses Instagram for that.
The celebrity influencer shared a story about EthereumMax with her 228 million Instagram followers yesterday after previously posting about it in May. Talking into her cellphone, she says, "Hey guys, I have a big announcement."
The video then cuts to a page with the following in all caps:
"Are you guys into crypto???? This is not financial advice but sharing what my friends just told me about the Ethereum Max token! A few minutes ago Ethereum Max burned 400 trillion tokens—literally 50% of their admin wallet giving back to the entire E-Max community."
It's then followed by the necessary hashtags, including #AD, signifying that this is an advertisement. That's important because it provides some form of legal cover to celebrities shilling potentially toxic supplements, lifestyles, and shitcoins. Mayweather himself neglected this step in 2018 while touting Centra (we barely remember it, too), causing the Securities and Exchange Commission to sue him for not revealing he had been paid to endorse the token. While he paid a fine, Centra's founder went to prison.
Kardashian and Mayweather aren't the only ones touting the coin. Former NBA great Paul Pierce, who found himself out of a job as an ESPN analyst after sharing a video of himself gambling with adult performers, told the sports network in May he was happier anyway with his new love, EthereumMax:
.@espn I don’t need you. I got @ethereum_max I made more money with this crypto in the past month then I did with y’all in a year. TRUTH shall set u Free 🤪🤪 my own Bosshttps://t.co/3irnuWYve3 check it out for yourself
— Paul Pierce (@paulpierce34) May 26, 2021
"I made more money with this crypto in the past month then [sic] I did with y’all in a year," he tweeted, along with a link to the eMax web page.
So, what is EthereumMax?
It's basically an ERC-20 token, which means it's programmed to run atop the Ethereum blockchain. Like Safemoon, another fringe offering, it promises to give token holders a cut of all transactions, in this case 3%. It released two quadrillion tokens (not a typo), which have traded for fractions of a penny since the launch on May 14. It primarily trades against ETH on Uniswap, a decentralized exchange that allows anyone to list a token.
We'd love to give you more information about eMax, but, well, there isn't much. No white paper (its roadmap says that's coming in Q3), a development team that doesn't give a lot of details about their background, and the two contributors to its smart contracts have been on GitHub for less than a month. It's mostly just a marketing campaign.
In short, it looks sketchy, according to some observers. (Then again, decentralized finance does mean you can create your own currency even if you don't know how many founders you have.)
And Kardashian's promotion of it gives the token greater visibility.
For those keeping count, Kardashian has the 10th-biggest reach on social media, with 319 million followers across Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram as of May, according to Visual Capitalist—and 228 million followers on Instagram alone. Compare that to Dogecoin-champion Elon Musk, who has a mere 56 million.
Instagram Stories work a bit like Snapchat. The photos and videos on them stay up for 24 hours and then disappear; rather than appearing on a profile page, they appear when users click on the poster's profile photo. Since Kardashian has more followers than Brazil has people, suffice it to say that a lot of people have seen this ephemeral post about EthereumMax.
They're not buying, though. Though the token pumped 5,532% in the last two weeks, it's dumped 32% in the last 24 hours.
Maybe Kim's just not fashionable anymore.