As Khamzat Chimaev awaits a clean bill of health to resume his MMA career, the UFC middleweight contender is now the latest prominent name attached to a suspicious cryptocurrency.
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Earlier this week via a now-deleted tweet, Khamzat Chimaev asked his over 677,000 followers which cryptocurrency he should invest in. Apparently, the post wasn’t seeking honest advice from fight fans but was instead a rollout.
The following day, Khamzat Chimaev posted a video promoting the SMASH coin, a meme coin named after his promises to “smash” opponents in the cage.
Shortly after the also-deleted video was posted, a crypto investigator by the screen name of ZachXBT replied with screenshots of the over 94% dive in SMASH coin’s value upon “Borz” video announcement.
ZachXBT followed up hours later with a summary of his investigation and allegations of insider trading. “Khamzat your team is incompetent as you directly linked the team wallets with the insider wallets buying up 78%+ of the supply,” the tweet says. The anonymous user pointed to “timing analysis” as proof that the developers bought the meme coin to artificially inflate the value before dumping the supply and leaving buyers with a largely worthless asset.
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The post also included relevant coding, time stamps, and a graphic showing how the 712 million units of SMASH were dispersed.
Khamzat Chimaev ‘Nuking’ Reputation
Chimaev is far from the first celebrity to become involved with a cryptocurrency scam. In January 2022, NBA great Paul Pierce, Floyd Mayweather Jr, and Kim Kardashian were named as defendants in a class action lawsuit against Ethereum Max for a similar “pump and dump” scheme.
In January, WWE star/social media influencer Logan Paul began offering partial refunds to fans after being the subject of his own class action lawsuit involving an NFT-based game called CryptoZoo.
The latest news about Chimaev comes less than three weeks after an illness forced him to withdraw from his headlining spot against Robert Whittaker at UFC Saudi Arabia. After beginning his UFC campaign with three stoppage wins in two months in 2020, the Checean has only fought four times since.
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