MrBeast Accused of Making Millions of Dollars Pumping and Dumpin' Low-Cap Tokens
The investigation revealed that MrBeast made tens of millions of dollars from "shill" low-cap tokens, and was allegedly involved in pump and dump schemes.
According to an investigation conducted by on-chain analyst @somaxbt, YouTube star Jimmy Donaldson (also known as MrBeast) is accused of making more than $10 million by "shill" to push up token prices, then "dump" and take profits on a series of low-cap crypto projects.
The projects implicated in this on-chain investigation include SuperFarm (SUPER), Polychain Monsters (PMON), SPLYT (SHOPX), Virtue Poker (VPP), and several others, as their tokens were recorded as “going underground” after each MrBeast sell-off – a practice commonly referred to by traders in the industry as a “pump and dump” scheme.
Through a series of tweets on the X platform published by SomaXBT on October 11, 2024, the analyst claimed to have traced MrBeast’s on-chain activities based on the wallet address labeled with the same name on the Arkham Intelligence tool. Thereby, he cited many cases where MrBeast invested small amounts of capital in tokens through private agreements such as Initial DEX Offerings (IDOs) to “get rich”.
One of the most prominent cases is the SuperFarm project (now renamed SuperVerse - token code SUPER) backed by the account @elliotrades.
According to SomaXBT, MrBeast invested $100,000 in this project and received 1 million SUPER tokens. Immediately after the investment announcement with the participation of this famous Youtuber, the token price "skyrocketed".
By March 30, 2021, MrBeast was said to have transferred his SUPER tokens to a secondary wallet, where they were sold off through a series of transactions, earning a total of 1,900 ETH (worth about $3.7 million at that time).
Not stopping there, MrBeast later received a large amount of SUPER according to the token payment schedule from the project, then sold them to "pocket" another $5.5 million, bringing the amount earned from this SuperVerse project to about $9 million.
Next, SomaXBT also mentioned MrBeast's involvement in another low-cap project, Polychain Monsters (now renamed Protocol Monsters - token code PMON). In this case, MrBeast is said to have "invested" $25,000 and received 25,000 PMON tokens.
By March 31, 2021, MrBeast's wallet is said to have transferred the PMON tokens to another wallet address, where they were "dumped" through a series of transactions with a total value of up to 685 ETH (about $1.3 million at that time).
Similar to SuperVerse (SUPER), MrBeast also received the amount of PMON tokens vesting according to the original agreement in the following period. The Protocol Monsters deal helped this Youtuber "pocket" about $1.7 million.
The investigation also detailed MrBeast's "involvement" in the SHOPX (SHOPX token), Jigstack (STAK), Virtue Poker (VPP) projects, with the total proceeds after the token sale falling to more than 2 million USD.
Notably, before each sale of the above tokens, MrBeast - an influencer with a "huge" number of followers - often commented under the project's articles, causing the token price to "rise" to its peak at that time. But just a short time later, the tokens all recorded a "downhill" decline, causing small investors to suffer a sharp decline when the token price plummeted.
Notably, the time of the token's decline "coincidentally" occurred right after on-chain data showed that MrBeast's wallet address sold these tokens. For example, SUPER is currently down 75% in value compared to ATH, even tokens like PMON or SHOPX are even "more terrible" when the graph "goes underground".
Rough statistics, just in 2021 with 5 crypto projects with low capitalization value, the total amount of money Youtuber MrBeast earned from selling the above tokens is up to about 12.7 million USD. This is only calculated based on recorded data, and from 2022 to present, it is unclear how many projects this KOL is involved in to "pocket" a huge amount of money!
