Messi and Ronaldinho promoted memecoin Solana on Instagram, causing the price to increase 400% in just a few hours. Is this an attractive investment opportunity or just a scam?
On July 9, the cryptocurrency community was stirred when Lionel Messi, the world's top soccer star, promoted a new memecoin on the Solana platform called Water (WATER) on his Instagram account.
The photo posted by Messi is a photo of him with a background of an ocean of water and the representative character of the Water project.
Messi's Instagram Story promotes WaterCoin
Messi currently has 504 million followers on Instagram, behind Cristiano Ronaldo with 634 million followers. He is also one of the owners of Instagram accounts with the highest number of followers on this platform.
Ronaldinho's official Instagram page with more than 76 million followers also posted a promotional post for the WaterCoin project on the same day, July 9.
Ronaldinho also participated in promoting the WaterCoin project on his Instagram
If this is a true cooperation strategy, it proves that the project has invested a lot in "spending heavily" on promotional campaigns to increase visibility and accessibility.
Page X of the WaterCoin project currently has nearly 190 thousand followers. The unusual point is that the project has hidden all of its posts. Up to now, Messi and his team have not released any official information about his connection to the project.
Page X of the WaterCoin project (WATER)
After Messi's post, the price of the WATER token skyrocketed 400% in just three hours. However, on-chain analysts have warned that a group of wallets is controlling up to 35% of the total supply of WATER tokens.
This is a sign of the risk that the project can easily be manipulated in price and pose great risks to investors. Bubblemaps, an on-chain tracking tool, has warned users about the risks of price manipulation and urged people to stop investing in the token. But all on-chain warnings seem ineffective when compared to the level of influence of Messi or Ronaldinho.
In recent times, there have been many cases of celebrities' accounts being taken over by hackers to advertise fraudulent memecoin projects. Once their accounts are restored, these celebrities often delete all posts related to these memecoins.
Prominent examples include actor Sydney Sweeney and rapper 50 Cent. Unlike other celebrities, in Messi's case, the post still exists on his Instagram account, and Messi has not made any statement about his account being hacked.
Celebrities promoting cryptocurrency projects is not new, but it always poses many risks for investors. A good example is the NFT and token collection of former NBA basketball player Dwight Howard.
In terms of popularity, although Dwight Howard is not as good as Messi, he is still one of the most famous centers in the basketball world.
Dwight Howard NFT Ballers Collection
At the end of January 2024, Dwight Howard launched the "Ballers" NFT collection on the Avalanche blockchain, but received heavy criticism about the design quality, causing Ava Labs to deny any association with this project. .
Recently, Dwight Howard also launched the "BALL" token, but the price of this token plummeted almost to zero immediately after its release, similar to a rug pull. Currently, this token is no longer traded and the project's homepage has also been deleted.
Dwight Howard's BALL token has a rug pull sign
