Celebrities Avoid Dark Divisions: Is Jenner’s New Coin Launch an Exploitation of Influence or Malicious Harvesting?

Original | Odaily Planet Daily
Author | Nan Zhi


Yesterday, Caitlyn Jenner, the stepfather of the Kardashian family, released the Pump token JENNER. At that time, most users thought it was a hacker stealing the account. After that, many stories were reversed, and the market value of the token once rose to 40 million US dollars.
While the community is still paying attention to JENNER, Caitlyn Jenner unexpectedly released a new Pump token BBARK around 2 am today. After the news was released, JENNER’s price plummeted from $0.027 to $0.011, a decrease of about 60%.


In fact, before Jenner released the pump link, most of the tokens had already been sold in the internal market, and the top ten addresses held 49% of the tokens. Following JENNER’s example, many users sniped the tokens at the opening, causing the market value to rise from $70,000 to $5 million after trading began.
Within a short period of more than ten minutes, the trading volume reached 20 million US dollars, but there was no sign of price increase.
By looking at some data websites, we can see that the major holders who bought in the internal market at that time continued to sell, and each address made hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit.


Later, Jenner posted a new tweet, and one sentence in the content was “It’s not just my token,” implying that the latest token BBARK was not planned and launched by her personally. However, this tweet did not affect the traders, and the token price continued to fluctuate sideways.


A few minutes later, Jenner deleted the previous tweet about BBARK, and the token price dropped by 50%. The user who held the most tokens also sold 10% of the tokens at once. Afterward, Jenner updated the tweet and attached an advertisement label, directly stating that the token was not owned by her, but was a promotion for another team’s token. One hour after the token was launched, Jenner deleted all the posts about BBARK and said, “That third-party token advertisement has been taken down. As I said from the beginning, I only care about JENNER, and the advertisement I posted has confused too many people and is not worth it.”
After the first deletion, the market value of the token began to fall, from $2 million to the current $100,000. JENNER started to rise again and has recovered 50% of the decline, with a market value of $20 million again.


Openly harvesting?
Assuming that this event is malicious manipulation of the market, we can speculate the story behind it:
Jenner first used Pump to buy most of the chips;
Announced the new token on Twitter, and made a large profit by selling at high prices with the FOMO sentiment brought by JENNER;
At the same time, caused a sharp decline in JENNER, and collected chips at the bottom;
After making a profit, delete all posts related to the new token, attract attention back to JENNER, and make a profit from the rise.
Of course, this is only a speculation from a conspiracy theory perspective, and we cannot know the truth. However, the extreme token distribution and dumping, as well as the deletion and modification of tweets multiple times, all imply that this is not a simple promotion.
Jenner is the first celebrity to use Pump to launch tokens. Unlike the situation mentioned in the “Pump PVP Manual” before, which uses false big Vs to fish, Jenner is a celebrity who can truly monetize her influence. This situation is similar to the peak period of NFT in 2022. With the popularity of NFT, many celebrities began to promote projects, and after making profits, they left behind projects that were worthless.
As a form of attention economy, compared with NFT, Meme is more difficult to maintain attention and generate additional value through operation and creation. For users, it is only a short-term hype project. For example, today, rapper Rich The Kid (with about 2.4 million fans on the X platform) also started his Pump token, which quickly rose and is currently at the bottom.
As more celebrities join the Pump token launch, it is a way for them to monetize their influence. But for users, the difficulty of making profits will increase rapidly, and they need to be wary of scams that harvest influence from celebrities.