A lot of the celebrity support for cryptocurrencies revolves around the Initial Coin Offerings (ICO) the cryptocurrency startups create. Actors, musicians, athletes, and entrepreneurs have all been drawn to the allure of cryptocurrencies. These are some of the most notable celebrity endorsements:
50 Cent
No rapper has benefited from the rise in popularity of cryptocurrencies like 50 Cent. In an effort to stay current with how his fans purchase music, 50 Cent accepted bitcoin purchases of his 2014 album Animal Ambition. He received 700 bitcoins, which were valued at $660 each, at the time, and admits he forgot about the stash. Once each bitcoin’s value exploded in 2017 to a record high of $19,850 in mid-December, his forgotten stash rose in value to as high as nearly $14 million. When 50 celebrated his new fortune in January, the value had dropped to $10,000 per bitcoin, enough for a nearly $8 million haul.
Ashton Kutcher:
The That 70s Show star has had a complicated, but profitable relationship with technology over the last decade. He portrayed Steve Jobs in a film, and was an early investor in Airbnb and Uber. One of his early hits was in cryptocurrency, and it’s starting to pay off. Kutcher is one of the earliest celebrities to the cryptocurrency craze, tweeting about Ethereum in May 2014, more than a year before its initial release in July 2015. Ethereum is now one of the biggest cryptocurrencies in the world, with one Ethereum valued at more than $830, at the time of press. Kutcher also invested in Bitcoin processing service Bitbay, and regularly updates his 19 million Twitter followers about the latest Bitcoin news.
DJ Khaled
DJ Khaled’s greatest talent is promotion. He can make any mundane meetings feel like the Super Bowl with his boisterous personality and grandiose descriptions of everything. Just like Mayweather, Khaled used his social media promotional prowess to endorse the potential of cryptocurrency platform Centra. In September 2017, Khaled bragged to his more than 12 million followers on Twitter and Instagram about having a “titanium centra debit card” from Centra. A month later in October 2017, he posted a video on his Instagram page showing off the features of Centra Wallet app on his iPhone, a few weeks after the app hit the Apple Store.