Celebrities don't engage in hidden harvesting: Is Jenner's new coin issuance about realizing influence or malicious harvesting?

Original | Odaily Planet Daily

Author | Nan Zhi

Yesterday, Caitlyn Jenner, the stepfather of the Kardashian family, released the token JENNER. At that time, most users thought it was a hacker hijacking the account, but later many reversal stories happened, and the market capitalization of the token once soared to $40 million.

Just as the community continues to follow JENNER, around 2 am today, Caitlyn Jenner unexpectedly released a new Pump Token BBARK, and 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 basically been sold out in the internal market, with the top ten addresses holding 49% of the tokens. Following Jenner’s example, many users sniped the tokens at the opening, causing the market capitalization to rise from $70,000 to $5,000,000 directly after trading began.

In just over ten minutes, the trading volume reached 20 million US dollars, but there is no sign of a pump in token prices.

According to some data websites, at that time, large investors who bought in the internal market continued to sell, with each address making tens of thousands of dollars in profit.

Shortly after, Jenner posted a new tweet, in which she mentioned “not just my own token”, implying that the latest token BBARK was not personally planned and released by her, but the tweet did not affect traders, and the token price is still fluctuating sideways.

In a few minutes, Jenner deleted the previous tweet about BBARK, and the token price plummeted by 50%, causing the top holder to liquidate 10% of the tokens in one go. Subsequently, Jenner updated the tweet, attaching an advertisement disclaimer, directly stating that the token was not owned by him, but was a promotion for tokens issued by another team. One hour after the token was launched, Jenner deleted all posts about BBARK and stated, “The third-party token advertisement has been removed. As I have said from the beginning, my only concern is JENNER, and the ads I posted have confused too many people, not worth it.”

Token market capitalization has been falling since the first post deletion, dropping from 2 million US dollars to the current 100,000 US dollars. Meanwhile, JENNER has started to rise again, reclaiming 50% of the decline and the market cap has reached 20 million US dollars again.

Harvesting revealed cards?

Assuming this event is a malicious market manipulation, one can speculate about the story behind it:

• Jenner first used Pump to buy most of the chips; *Announce the new coin on Twitter, take advantage of the FOMO sentiment brought by JENNER to sell at a large profit;
• Launching new coins at the same time causing a big dump in JENNER, collecting chips at the bottom;
• After selling for profit, delete the news related to the new Token, and focus on attracting attention back to JENNER and profiting from the rebound.

Of course, this is just speculation from a conspiracy theory perspective, and we cannot know the truth. However, the extreme distribution and dumping of the new coin, as well as the multiple deletion of tweets and changes in stance, all suggest that there is more to this promotion than meets the eye.

Jenner is the first celebrity to use Pump for coin issuance. Unlike the use of fake big V fishing mentioned in the “Pump PVP Manual” before, Jenner is a celebrity who can truly monetize her influence. Similar to the peak period of NFT in 2022, many celebrities have started to endorse projects with the popularity of NFT, leaving behind projects that are all feathers after completing a round of profit harvesting.

As a form of attention economy, compared to NFT, Meme is more difficult to maintain attention, and it is also harder to generate additional value through operation and creation, which is just a short-term speculative project for users. For example, in the early hours of today, the rapper Rich The Kid (with approximately 2.4 million fans on platform X) also started his Pump coin, which quickly surged but has now fallen to the bottom.

With the joining of celebrities into the ranks of Pump coin issuance, it is the realization of influence for them, but for users, the difficulty of making profits will rise rapidly, and they need to be vigilant against the influence harvesting eyewash from celebrities.