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Star with goods NFT after all by law supervision?

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What forms of celebrity advertising are legal? What's up with Justin Bieber's "The Boring Ape"?

Original title: "Curry, SHAquille O 'Neal with goods NFT after all is not regulated by law?"

This article is from the official account:Old yuppie

The recent influx of public figures into the NFT world, the old Yuppie has reported a number of celebrities owning NFT news in a previous article on the official account. For those who have been in the entertainment industry for a long time, the first question they often think about this boom is: Did they really pay for those ape heads?

If a celebrity gets an NFT for free, the most likely motive is that they use it to create buzz and drive demand for the project through endorsements. The question then becomes: what forms of celebrity advertising are legal? And what the hell is going on with Justin Bieber's "The Boring Ape"?

Let's start with something simple. Take Gwyneth Paltrow for example. Her new avatar is NFT from Flower Girl. Now, Paltrow's endorsements are big business, part of how she built Goop into a lifestyle brand. For example, what do you like, what do you buy, and what do you show off? What is the legal degree.

But cryptocurrencies are very public, whereas the rest of the Goop brand is not. In order for Paltrow's NFT profile picture to appear, her Twitter account had to be associated with a specific wallet. Clicking on her profile picture will show NFT's contract address on Etherscan, which you can use to work out her wallet address. And one of the features of cryptocurrency wallets is that it is possible to "airdrop "things to any known wallet without the involvement of the owner. Airdrop is an important part of marketing cryptocurrency projects and is often used to build a user base.

So, once Paltrow's wallet is known, any NFT project can simply drop the NFT airto that wallet. If she gets an NFT that she likes and wants to use as her new avatar, does she have to disclose that she got it for free?

Because celebrity marketing is so powerful, the FTC has proposed a series of rules around influencer endorsements on social media platforms. It is the responsibility of the posters to disclose that they received something as a promotional quote or that they were paid to advertise the product. Under these guidelines, any financial, personal, employment or family relationships must be disclosed.

So I emailed the FTC to ask what this meant for AirDrop. FTC spokeswoman Juliana Gruenwald said the agency can't comment on any specific celebrity or situation, but there is a general principle at work: If consumers may not know about a marketer's relationship with a celebrity, they should disclose it. So, relevant questions include whether the star is actually endorsing a product or service on behalf of the marketer, whether the endorser's followers expect any connection, and knowing whether that connection will affect how followers view the endorsement, she wrote in an emailed statement.

There are also some situations that stars do not need to disclose to the public, such as advertising. Just think of it with your toes and you can see matt Damon is getting paid, comparing trading cryptocurrencies to the Wright Brothers building planes for Crypto.com. But what you receive for free is a little more ambiguous: a star can receive an NFT on their birthday, and there is no connection between them and the NFT marketer. When a person receives payment, a gift for a product they endorse, or a payment in kind in exchange for an endorsement, it needs to be disclosed to the public, Gruenwald notes.

So if I have an NFT project to promote, it might be worth my while to give the star AirDrop some gifts in case one of them likes it and talks about it. This doesn't seem to violate FTC guidelines, like gift bags at an awards show, but it does make it harder for consumers to tell whom they can trust.

Let's be honest: stars exist to sell things, which is why they were invented in 20th-century Hollywood. They are also useful in business. Financial vehicles known as special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) already have star sponsors such as Golden State Warriors' Stephen Curry, Hall of Fame basketball player Shaquille O 'Neal, former House Speaker Paul Ryan and Moneyball's Billy Beane. Stars make it easier to raise money and get media attention. It makes no difference to the public.

In fact, it's probably truer to the public than anything else. That's because public-facing projects, once successful, signal a commitment to the community, and stars often bring their fans.

Assuming at least one person from CAA is keen on NFT, this explains the investment. This person is likely to have dinner with some celebrity clients and excitedly talk about their new hobby, aka NFT collecting, leading the star to decide to take up a new hobby herself. This is different from CAA arranging stars to advertise its investments, which may require disclosure.

For example. When investor Katie Haun, then an investor in a16Z cryptocurrency (now out on her own), had dinner with a group of women in the entertainment industry, it wasn't on the blockchain. If it wasn't for the Fortune story, I wouldn't even know about it. That dinner was enough to get Mindy Kaling and Paltrow into NFT.

Such relationships don't really fall within the FTC's purview, although the results can be lucrative. Star NFT owners can make projects more valuable by associating themselves with them. Reese Witherspoon, for example, fronted the Women's World NFT program in October. In January, the program generated more than $40 million in just two weeks, thanks in part to star sales.

Transaction charts for wallets linked to Witherspoon's NFT show a complex web of funds. Links between other wallets, in turn, fund Witherspoon's wallet, suggesting that one entity could gain access to at least $180 million in assets on the chain. The people who created the roadmap argued that Witherspoon violated FTC disclosure guidelines. It's possible, but I'm not entirely convinced.

There's another interpretation of this trade chart, and it doesn't involve violating FTC rules. This may be an attempt to protect Witherspoon's financial privacy on the public blockchain, since one of the downsides of being a star is that people like to snoop. If Witherspoon is using a service that tries to anonymize some of her transactions, as many stars use shell companies to buy real estate, she may not need to disclose it. But trading networks alone are not enough to make clear what is going on.

One service comes to mind immediately. MoonPay, Snoop Dogg, Diplo and Jimmy Fallon have all used the service. Witherspoon isn't a MoonPay customer, so a possible explanation for Witherspoon's transaction chart doesn't exist, spokesman Justin Hamilton said.

But it could explain the strange dealings of other stars, since many, including Paltrow, use MoonPay to get around the cumbersome part of buying NFT. MoonPay's star service grew out of CEO Evan Soto Wright's social circle, Hamilton said. Soto-wright has been getting calls from celebrity friends asking to help him get into NFT like a C-Suite customer service rep. (" It's cool, but it's impossible to scale, "Soto-Wright says.) So the company -- which is mostly a B2B connection between fiat currencies and cryptocurrencies -- built a consumer-facing service.

MoonPay's concierge service isn't for people who are already comfortable in the cryptocurrency ecosystem. It's for people who are just getting into it. So users tell MoonPay what assets they want. MoonPay bought it, helped customers build their own wallets, did "know your customer" and anti-money laundering compliance, and then put assets in customers' wallets. They then charge the customer in fiat money. That's a big deal for customers, and part of MoonPay's broader, non-consumer-centric business: letting people pay for digital assets with credit cards.

This also explains why some star wallets seem to show a star getting NFT for free. They didn't get it for free, but the payment took place outside of the blockchain record because it was paid in the almighty dollar.

MoonPay has already done one celebrity endorsement deal: videos with Post Malone and The Weeknd. But all those stars you see tweeting about concierge services, they're just satisfied customers, Hamilton says. And the tweets don't violate FEDERAL Trade Commission rules.

Justin Bieber is another MoonPay customer. His non-Moonpay deals look even stranger, but I'm not going to pretend I know anything.

A Bieber-linked wallet, not his MoonPay wallet, bought Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT for 500ETH, about $1.3 million at settlement. However, this is much higher than the bottom price of 100ETH set by the seller. Bieber posted an image of the NFT on his Instagram, but didn't say he bought it.

I point out Bieber's language because I'm not sure the money came from Bieber himself. (Some argue that Bieber didn't buy his ape, based on what I consider inconclusive identical evidence). Clues to the deal went to another wallet, which was linked to a NFT project called InBetweeners. Bieber got a gift of InBetweeners NFT in December and has since bought more. It is unclear what the relationship between InBetweeners and Bieber is. Did anyone else buy Bieber an ape as payment in kind for his promotional services with InBetweeners? Does Bieber rely on his friends to make deals for him in order to keep some of his financial privacy? Or something else? And how does all this fit into the FTC's influencer endorsement framework?

Suppose you think what Bieber is doing is illegal. There's no way to know for sure except to wait for the FTC investigation. When it comes to questionable endorsements, the recourse available to the average person is almost nonexistent.

At this point, the more I think about stars and NFT, the crazier the situation seems to me. Take Cozimo de Medici's Twitter account, which has fewer than 200,000 followers as of this writing. Last September, the account said it would reveal "my real-life stardom" to bring more attention to NFT. Then, America's Stoner Uncle Snoop tweeted from his own account that he was Cozimo de Medici, which may or may not be true. Both Slate and Vice claim that tweets from the Cozimo account show that Snoop is not Cozimo.

Just for fun, let's assume that the De-Medici account is not Snoop's. In this hypothetical situation, yes, cheating has occurred. So, what then? The FTC's guidelines don't seem to fit. The guidelines suggest that if a star endorses something on behalf of a marketer, the relationship should be disclosed, if it's not obvious. But for starters: here's...... What is the endorsement? A fake name? The investment under this pseudonym? Does being associated with the stars in this indirect way violate any FTC rules? What on earth is going on?

The FTC's guidelines don't seem to fit. The guidelines suggest that if a star speaks for something on behalf of a marketer, the relationship should be disclosed if it is not obvious. But here... What is the endorsement? An alias? Investment under this alias? Does being associated with the stars in this indirect way violate any FTC rules? What on earth is going on?

In today's article, we only discuss the influence of stars. Lao Yuppie reminds you that not only stars, but also Internet celebrities, Internet celebrities and even platform anchors may have such influence, which will affect your judgment.