Nigerian singer Davido is the latest celebrity to be implicated in a rug-pull orchestrated by Sahil Arora, an Indian national allegedly behind several recent pump-and-dump schemes.
On May 29, Davido, who has more than 15.3 million followers on X and 7.9 million monthly listeners on Spotify, introduced a memecoin named “DAVIDO.” The launch featured the tagline: “The pump stops when time stops.”
According to chain tracker Lookonchain, the DAVIDO memecoin was launched on the popular Solana memecoin generator pump.fun. The token address received 7.5 SOL as startup capital following its launch.
From the transfer, 7 SOL was used to purchase 203 million DAVIDO tokens, representing 20.3% of the total supply.
Davido then promoted the token to his followers on X, encouraging them to hold onto DAVIDO and expressing his expectation that the token would reach a $30 million market cap.
Eleven hours later, Davido sold 121.88 million DAVIDO tokens for 2,791 $SOL, which was worth roughly $474,000 at the time. Consequently, the token’s price plummeted by over 90% from its all-time high of $0.003297 on Wednesday.
As of the time of publication, the token was trading at $0.002343, a 37% decline from its peak value.
Lookonchain also reported a transfer of 20 million DAVIDO tokens to an address labeled “dead1111…1111.”
The price crash has sparked concerns about a potential rug pull orchestrated by the Nigerian singer, who has yet to address the situation.
Celebrity-themed tokens have drawn significant attention this week due to multiple instances of these tokens being dumped on investors seeking quick profits.
American media personality Caitlyn Jenner also launched JENNER, a SOL-based meme coin on pump.fun. However, within hours of its launch, the token’s price plummeted as developers offloaded large quantities of pre-acquired tokens.
It was later uncovered that Sahil Arora, an alleged scammer, orchestrated the incident by exploiting Jenner’s lack of cryptocurrency knowledge and misusing his position as a middleman to profit from the token.
The same scammer also raised over $300,000 in a token presale using the name of Australian musician Iggy Azalea. Sahil launched the IGGY coin, which initially surged over 30,000% but ultimately resulted in a pump-and-dump scheme. At the time of publication, the token is down over 70% from its May 29 all-time high.
American rapper “Rich the Kid” has also accused Arora of hacking his X account to promote a scam token called “RICH” under his name.
Interestingly, a report from Magazine revealed that Arora circulated a list of celebrities he claimed could secure promotions for.
The list, shared by a crypto exchange listings manager, included celebrity endorsement fees ranging from $6,000 to $315,000 for high-profile names such as Justin Bieber, Kim Kardashian, and Lindsay Lohan.
Davido was also listed with a fee of $8,000. This connection implies that Arora might have a connection to the recent rug-pull incident associated with Davido’s meme coin.
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