DeAndre Cortez Way, more popularly known as Soulja Boy, rose to popularity with his self published debut single “Crank That (Soulja Boy)”. Nearly 16 years later, the American rapper’s prominence has found resurgence in the crypto space–albeit in a potentially questionable way, to say the least.
Twitter user @zachxbt listed down all the crypto projects that Way promoted on his social media platforms, characterizing that “many of these were scams.” In total, they observed 73 crypto promotions and 16 NFT drops.
ZachXBT is known for their online investigations of crypto promotions and projects. More recently, they worked with YouTube channel Coffeezilla, run by Stephen Findeisen, in tricking MMA fighter Dillon Danis to promote a fake NFT project without the due diligence of checking if it’s a scam.
ZachXBT also noted that Way was recently been sued, along with other celebrities, for promoting Tronix (TRX) and BitTorrent (BTT) coins, which were deemed by the SEC as unregistered securities. The regulatory agency has charged several celebrities with illegally touting the coins without disclosing they were compensated.
Way was charged alongside Lindsay Lohan, Jake Paul, Austin Mahone, Kendra Lust, Lil Yachty, Ne-Yo and Akon.
The Twitter user also listed down some examples of crypto projects Way promoted on his social media that were later found to be questionably borderline scams.
These projects include:
- RapDoge, which was rug pulled immediately after the price spiked following promotions
- Orion & The Life Token, which were both rugged and their social media pages abandoned
- SaferMars, where Way seemingly tweeted the instructions to him as well about his compensation for touting the token. The project also rug pulled soon after.
- Flokinomics, which Way said was created by Elon Musk
- ParrotsDAO, which rug pulled after 24 hours of promotion. Way deleted his tweets about it after.
Way also promoted NFT collections, one of which is called SouljaBoyNFT which was “advertised [to have] many forms of utility yet the website is offline.”
ZachXBT also noted that Way dropped 7 different NFTs in April 2023 alone. The first was a 3D NFT with the Ferrari and Nike logos, which was later removed from NFT marketplace OpenSea within a few hours due to intellectual property infringement.
The Twitter thread further noted that Way was “charging up to $12k for Instagram & $10k for Twitter promotions.” Based on these, ZachXBT estimated that the rapper would have earned around $730,000 from the promotions he did.
“It’s abundantly clear Soulja Boy will do anything to make money regardless of whether or not it hurts his fans. I suspect there are more examples than what I found,” said ZachXBT. “I believe he should be made an example of as legal action does not seem to deter his actions.”
Way was named as a defendant, along with Jake Paul, Nick Carter, Lil Yachty, and Ben Phillips in a class-action lawsuit filed against the cryptocurrency firm SafeMoon on February 18, 2022. The suit alleged the company is a pump-and-dump scheme for promoting the SafeMoon token on their social media accounts with misleading information.
Or maybe, we haven’t just heard his side of the story.
Information for this briefing was found via the sources mentioned. The author has no securities or affiliations related to this organization. Not a recommendation to buy or sell. Always do additional research and consult a professional before purchasing a security. The author holds no licenses.
