On November 13, British citizen Naeem Azad and Romanian citizen Mihai Caluseru filed a lawsuit in the U.S. federal court in California, accusing Caitlyn Jenner and her agent Sophia Hutchins of fraudulently soliciting financially unsophisticated investors in the United States and abroad to purchase unregistered securities.
Caitlyn Jenner is a former Olympic champion, but she is better known as the stepfather of Kim Kardashian and other members of the Kardashian family, as well as a transgender woman. Her token JENNER was launched on Solana through pump.fun on May 27. As soon as it was launched, it caused huge price fluctuations due to the controversy over whether it was launched by her (related reading: 160 times in 8 hours, did Kardashian's transgender stepfather issue a coin?). After a series of dramatic stories, according to dexscreener data, the market value peaked at $40 million.
But as the craze for celebrity coins faded, as the complaint alleges, “Jenner appears to have completely abandoned the project and is no longer actively promoting it, leaving holders with severe losses that are unlikely to be recovered.”
Since rebounding to a market value of $10 million in early June, the price and trading volume of $JENNER have been falling, with a market value of only more than $200,000 for a long time. However, after the news of the lawsuit came out, $JENNER actually saw a 30% increase due to this wave of "black traffic", and its current market value is about $800,000.
The two investors claimed to have lost more than $56,000 by investing in JENNER tokens. In the lawsuit, they mentioned that if it were not for Caitlyn Jenner's public promotion and "false and misleading statements", they would not have made such an investment decision. They also said that Caitlyn Jenner deliberately failed to register with the SEC, which lacked sufficient transparent information to assess the investment risks.
But is it just Caitlyn Jenner who is “making a big fuss”? No. The indictment also mentioned that Caitlyn Jenner once tweeted that she “would not launch a token again”, but in the end, she still launched another $JENNER token on Ethereum.
Additionally, the $JENNER token on Ethereum has a 3% transaction fee for each transaction, and Caitlyn Jenner has never disclosed the existence of transaction fees.
Currently, the $JENNER token on Ethereum has a market cap of only about $100,000, while at its peak, the market cap was about $8 million.
Of course, we can’t say that all “celebrity coins” are “short-lived”. Another star project in the “celebrity coin” craze six months ago, rapper Iggy Azalea’s $MOTHER, still has a market value of $80 million. Although it is far from the peak market value of $300 million, it has at least formed a stable meme in operation.
Throughout the history of Crypto, "celebrity coins" are just examples of celebrities using cryptocurrency players as ATMs, which accounts for the vast majority. Kim Kardashian, another member of the Kardashian family, was accused by the SEC in 2022 of promoting $EMAX without disclosing the publicity compensation. In the end, Kim Kardashian paid a fine of $1.26 million and agreed not to promote any cryptocurrency for 3 years. NBA star "Shaq" O'Neal was also sued for promoting the NFT project "Astrals" on Solana. He said in Discord after FTX collapsed that "he would not leave", but since then, he has not said a word in Discord.
In the cruel crypto market, the only one we can trust is ourselves.