It took less than 24 hours from the time Will Smith stomped up the stage of the Academy Awards and walloped Chris Rock for a cryptocurrency to be minted commemorating the Oscars debacle.
And true to form, that meme coin is rising fast.
The Will Smith Inu coin has seen its value soar 469% in the past 24 hours. And that’s 35% lower than the highs it hit at 7:00 a.m. ET on Tuesday.
Before you jump in—and we would strongly caution against that—recognize that you’d still need 2.3 million Will Smith Inu coins to cash them in for a dollar bill at present.
This sort of thing might sound familiar to veterans of the crypto world.
A pop culture moment happens, someone (often multiple someones) will mint a coin around it, hoping to cash in on the publicity, then the coin will either fade away or the creators will abandon it in a rug pull and walk away with thousands, or millions, of dollars. (Remember, if you will, the furor over the Squid Game token last year.)
These tokens are never licensed (Kanye West successfully sued the creators of one parody crypto several years ago) and investors in these generally move on quickly.
The crypto interest in Will Smith’s slap doesn’t end with tokens, either.
A DAO is already selling NFTs of the moment—and while the prices aren’t anywhere near Bored Ape Yacht Club levels, there are 2,000 of them and the volume still adds up.
A Will Smith Slap DAO NFT is going for anywhere from $7-$86 right now.
To date, the collective has sold 13.7 ether worth of the NFTs, which is more than $47,000. For now, they’re still being traded on OpenSea, but that marketplace tends to take a stern view on scam projects.
These projects, along with others riding the coattails of this moment, are likely just looking to have a laugh, like the seemingly infinite number of Twitter memes and comments about the slap. But when real money is involved, there’s always the chance for fraud.
And even if the operators’ intentions are nothing more than sarcastic, investors are still likely to lose whatever they put into the assets.
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