Will smith slap coinThe crypto hype is so infectious that it makes even a well-reasoned buyer leave caution to the wind.

If a celebrity slapping someone at a major event is something, taking inspiration from the controversy to churn the money market is quite another. At a recent Oscar Award function, Will smith slapped the comedian host for passing tasteless comments on his wife’s medical condition. Catching on the heat of the moment, a crypto token named Will Smith Inu (WSI) was created which rallied up by 10,000% and was valued at $0.0000006583 within hours of its creation. Will Smith Slap DAO NFTs started selling on OpenSea, the world’s largest exchange for NFTs, lending some popularity to Will Smith Inu.

There are numerous such incidents of money market in general and cryptocurrencies in particular, cashing on controversies. Indeed, fame is an effective multiplier that carries with it the potential for attracting eyeballs. Memecoins are a classic example of this phenomenon. They quickly imbibe popularity from pop-culture trends and gain value tremendously in a short span. We have Dogecoin, Shiba Inu, Floki Inu, SQUID coin, to name a few, which gained from memes and celebrity endorsements. The crypto hype is so infectious that it makes even a well-reasoned buyer leave caution to the wind. The crypto space is dotted with enough mires for a newbie to lose faith in the market. Of course, crypto investment is not about having faith but the ability to speculate well, because it is a thoroughly unregulated space, which is only comparable to gambling.

The fate of Celebrity coins

Popularity-driven cryptocurrencies are here to stay unless there is an institutional mechanism in place to check their proliferation. Until then, anyone can create a coin, run it for some time, leave it abruptly, and get away scot-free. SQUID coin which was milked riding on the back of the popularity of the Netflix series had a capital value of $3.3 million when the creators abandoned the project. A joke on Grimace coin by McDonald’s made people rush to buy a fake coin. Similarly, Toilet Paper Token (TPT) was generated, taking inspiration from CoinMarketCap’s April Fool joke. Even well-established cryptos like Ethereum, Binance can create secondary tokens associated with a celebrity or event which may eventually end up having no inherent value. It is pretty much evident that, the burden of diligence squarely lies on an investor’s shoulders, while for time being, Celebrity coins will be having their whirligig run in the crypto space to keep the curious investors in the spin.