Nigerian star Davido latest to be ensnarled in string of celebrity meme coin rug-pulls
Nigerian singer Davido the latest celebrity to be involved in a rug-pull masterminded by Sahil Arora, an Indian national allegedly responsible for a number of other recent pump and dumps.
With over 15.3 million followers on X and 7.9 million monthly listeners on Spotify, the singer launched a memecoin dubbed “DAVIDO” on May 29. The launch was accompanied by a tagline: “The pump stops when time stops.”
According to chain tracker Lookonchain, DAVIDO was launched on the popular Solana memecoin generator pump.fun. The token address received 7.5 SOL following its launch as startup capital.
7 SOL from the transfer was used to buy 203 million DAVIDO, accounting for 20.3% of the token’s total supply.
The singer was then seen promoting the token to his followers on X, where he even urged them to hold DAVIDO, claiming that he was expecting the token to hit a $30 million market cap.
11 hours later, the singer sold 121.88M DAVIDO for 2,791 $SOL, worth approximately $474,000 at the time. The price of the token crashed over 90% from its all-time high of $0.003297 on Wednesday.
At the time of publication, the token was trading at $0.002343, down 37% from its all-time high.
Lookonchain also identified a transfer of 20 million DAVIDO tokens to an address identified as “dead1111…1111.”
The price crash has raised concerns about a rug pull orchestrated by the Nigerian singer, who is yet to address the situation.
Celebrity-themed tokens have been under the spotlight this week, as there were several instances of these tokens being dumped on investors looking to make a quick buck.
American media personality Caitlyn Jenner also launched JENNER, a SOL-based meme coin on pump.fun. However, within a few hours of launch, the token’s price crashed after developers dumped large amounts of pre-acquired tokens.
It was later revealed that Sahil Arora, an alleged scammer, was behind the incident, exploiting Jenner’s lack of knowledge regarding the cryptocurrency space and abusing his role as a middleman to profit from the token.
The same scammer also raised over $300,000 in a token presale under the guise of Australian musician Iggy Azalea. Sahil launched the IGGY coin, which surged over 30,000% but ended up as a pump-and-dump scheme. The token is down over 70% from its May 29 all-time high at the time of publication.
American rapper “Rich the Kid” has also accused Arora of hacking his X account to promote a scam token dubbed “RICH” under his name.
Interestingly, a report from Magazine revealed that Arora circulated a list of celebrities for whom he alleged he could secure promotions.
The list, shared by a crypto exchange listings manager, contained celebrity endorsement fees ranging from $6,000 to $315,000 for major names like Justin Bieber, Kim Kardashian, and Lindsay Lohan.
Davido was also listed, priced at $8000. This connection raises the possibility that Arora could also be behind the recent rug pull incident involving Davido’s meme coin.
