UFC Star Launches Meme Coin, Falls to Zero in Minutes Amid Insider Trading Claims – Decrypt

Having didn’t put collectively a combat for 9 months straight, undefeated UFC famous person Khamzat Chimaev has pivoted to crypto—and now shilling his personal meme coin.

On Tuesday, the Russian-born wrestler requested followers which cryptocurrency he ought to put money into, inviting options—and panic—from his followers. It’s the identical playbook most celebs who’re about to launch their very own token have been operating as of late. And certain sufficient, that’s precisely what Chimaev did.

The following day, he requested followers to purchase the Khamzat-themed memecoin “SMASH”—named after his well-known mantra to “smash everybody” put in entrance of him.

“There may be one crypto coin about me—they name it SMASH,” Chimaev stated on Twitter. “Let’s ‘smash’ collectively guys—let’s go.”

Sadly for early patrons, SMASH plummeted to zero on Friday nearly as quick as Chimaev has completed most of his opponents. GeckoTerminal reveals that the token is down 96% prior to now 24 hours, having dramatically collapsed through the hours following the fighter’s tweet.

Conversant in such schemes, crypto veterans had been fast to name out Chimaev in his replies for what appeared like a basic crypto pump-and-dump. Blockchain detective ZachXBT was shortly capable of hyperlink the “insider wallets” that dumped a lot of the token’s provide on to the fighter’s improvement group wallets, suggesting this was an orchestrated rip-off.

“Utilizing timing evaluation confirms 71% insider and dev group wallets [are] instantly linked as they had been funded by [the] identical deal with on Ethereum,” ZachXBT defined.

The analyst cited numerous Solana addresses that acquired transfers from centralized crypto trade Binance and token-swapping app SideShift shortly after a standard Ethereum deal with had despatched transfers of roughly equal quantities to the exchanges.

In keeping with the sleuth’s evaluation, a kind of addresses was a SMASH insider pockets that later dispersed its 86.55 SOL (price roughly $12,000) to 24 separate addresses, by way of which it then bought 712 million SMASH—71.2% of your complete provide.

Chimaev has since deleted all tweets linked to crypto or his SMASH token.

The fighter was scheduled for a bout with number-three-ranked middleweight contender Robert Whittaker in Saudi Arabia on June 22, however was compelled to drag out of the combat as a consequence of extreme sickness. The combat has but to be rescheduled, however early SMASH patrons could also be hoping for a Chimaev comeuppance by the hands of Bobby Knuckles sooner moderately than later.