Recent events in the cryptocurrency space have illustrated the potential pitfalls of undisclosed influencer promotions once again. Over the past week, Grizzly, self-described "Chief Rug Officer" at Pymons, a London-based P2E platform, drew attention to the promotional tactics of Rollbit Coin (RLB).

When the owner of RLB, known as ‘Lucky’, invited existing partners to a ‘new bonus structure’ contingent on profitable trading of the token, Grizzly began to suspect sketchy activity was taking place. According to Lucky, influencers could be rewarded with up to $250,000 of RLB tokens if RLB prices climbed to and maintained a level of $0.20 or higher for a week or more. The terms of the deal reportedly required influencers to make “several organic RLB tweets” each week.

To support his theory of crypto twitter manipulation, Grizzly shared several alleged examples of influencer tweets about RLB. These included Pentoshi, who claimed that RLB was "interesting" to them, and cevo, who posted a RLB price prediction. Grizzly paid close attention to a particular influencer, Gainzy, alleging that Gainzy bought a considerable sum ($400,000) of the tokens, only to sell them shortly afterwards through a mixer and to a new address.

Grizzly postulated that this could mean one of two things: either the tokens were sold genuinely to increase liquidity or in an effort to manipulate the RLB market through promotion.

Unsurprisingly, Gainzy rejected these accusations, claiming that he lost a substantial sum of money speculating on RLB and that he does not receive payment for promoting tokens. Interestingly, he did not deny actively promoting the Rollbit Coin platform, but refused to give an opinion on the incentive structure of other influencers.

Grizzly then called on the RLB platform to make a statement concerning the matter and end the speculation on the matter by him and the other influencers. As of yet, Rollbit Coin has not made any comment on the matter.

The situation has been a cautionary example to crypto users of the potential rewards, but also risks, of undisclosed influencer activity. When armchair investors are fed rumors and predictions but not given the full information, all parties can be put into potentially volatile, high-risk and difficult to explain situations.



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