Former kickboxing champion and controversial influencer Andrew Tate is among the latest celebrities to dive into Kanye West’s newly launched YZY token, but his bets are already deep in the red.
A wallet address linked to Tate opened a 3x leveraged short position on the recently launched, West-linked YZY token at $0.85 and was sitting on a $16,000 loss on the position.
Tate “doesn’t seem to be good at perps trading,” as his cumulative losses are nearing $700,000 on this single Hyperliquid account, wrote blockchain analytics platform Lookonchain in a Friday X post. “So far, he’s made 80 trades on #Hyperliquid — only 29 were profitable (win rate: 36.25%) — with total losses of $699K.”
The YZY token was launched on Solana on Thursday by the rapper, with the top 13 wallets profiting a total of $24.5 million as they dumped the token, which spiked 1,400% within the first hour before dropping over 74% since.
With growing celebrity interest in cryptocurrencies, more influencers are realizing losses, showing that not all financial advice or investment endorsements should be treated equally.
The losing trade comes more than a year after Tate was hit by insider trading allegations related to his memecoin, the Daddy Tate (DADDY) token, which saw insiders scoop up 30% of the supply at launch before Tate started promoting the token on X, Cointelegraph reported at the time.
Most Andrew Tate-endorsed memecoins crashed by 99%
Tate joined waves of celebrities who jumped on the Solana memecoin bandwagon on June 7, 2024, endorsing more than 10 tokens known for having no intrinsic value.
Most of the tokens lost around 99% of their value shortly after Tate’s endorsement, with multiple tokens allegedly having up to 30% insider supply allocation, Bubblemaps warned in an X post in October 2024.
These included Roost (ROOST), the Germany Token (GER), Fuck Tristan (FTRISTAN), TopG (TOPG), RNT (RNT) and Daddy Tate (DADDY).
Over 30 celebrity-endorsed tokens launched on Solana in June 2024 and have seen prices fall by no less than 73.23%.
Other celebrities who promoted Solana-based meme tokens include 50 Cent, Caitlyn Jenner, Iggy Azalea and soccer legend Ronaldinho Gaúcho.
UFC contender Khamzat Chimaev-linked Smash (SMASH) token was also hit by insider allegations after it was revealed that up to 78% of the token’s supply was bought by team and developer-related wallets, Cointelegraph reported in July 2024.
Three days after the token launch, Chimaev’s manager, Majdi Shammas, claimed that the martial artist “wasn’t involved” with the SMASH memecoin and “[knows] just as little as you do,” alleging that he promoted the coin without the fighter’s input.