Did Kanye West just expose how celeb X hacks are used to pump fake meme coins?

Kanye West is again on X, and also you’ll by no means guess what occurred subsequent.

West, now often called Ye, the well-known rapper and Bitcoin advocate, posted a screenshot on Friday the place an unidentified contact reached out to Ye, providing him two million {dollars} to advertise a fraudulent “ye foreign money.”

I used to be proposed 2 million {dollars} to rip-off my group These left of it I mentioned no and stopped working with their one that proposed it pic.twitter.com/WKHdP9FkOq

— ye (@kanyewest) February 7, 2025

Ye would get $750,000 upfront as a part of the proposed deal, and a further $1.25 million disbursed 16 hours after the submit went stay on X.

A part of the deal was that the promotional submit should stay energetic for eight hours. The contact additionally instructed him to submit “my account was hacked, the submit was not me” after the eight-hour window.

The message chillingly concluded with the assertion that the corporate soliciting this promotion “might be scamming the general public out of tens of hundreds of thousands of {dollars}.”

Ye mentioned he turned down the $2 million provide, claiming he wouldn’t “rip-off my group.” Nevertheless, his submit raised questions concerning the reality behind earlier X account hacks concentrating on celebrities. These seemingly shared an identical scheme.

Are you telling me all the massive accounts getting “hacked” and posting a memecoin during the last a number of months are pretend?????

— notEezzy (delulu) 🧸 (@notEezzy) February 7, 2025

so the movie star ‘hacks’ are presumably pretend? pic.twitter.com/EzKY0TYBIq

— Jacquelyn Melinek (@jacqmelinek) February 7, 2025

Ye simply uncovered all of the celebrities that claimed they have been hacked scams on X

— Danny Kass (@dannygkass) February 7, 2025

A number of celebrities’ X accounts have been hacked to advertise Solana meme cash.

Final December, Drake’s account was hacked to advertise a Solana-based memecoin known as $ANITA. The rip-off generated $5 million in buying and selling quantity earlier than being uncovered and eliminated.

Ye appears to be like to attach immediately with Coinbase CEO “regarding crypto”

Ye additionally signaled curiosity in connecting immediately with Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong “regarding crypto.”

He posted one other screenshot at present the place he was asking somebody for a crypto hookup with none middlemen. It turned out that the “crypto join” he was in search of was Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, and the particular person he messaged mentioned they’d attempt to get Ye Armstrong’s quantity.

There was no public, direct connection between Ye and Armstrong previous to his current try and contact the CEO. Nevertheless, there was a recognized incident involving Armstrong and Ye’s presidential run over 4 years in the past.

In October 2020, Armstrong shared a tweet describing a weblog submit about voting for West as “epic.” The now-deleted submit was written by Rob Rhinehart, the founding father of Soylent, and it argued in favor of supporting the artist’s presidential run.

As quickly as Ye’s new submit surfaced, members of the crypto group warned that he was making an attempt to bypass middlemen by going straight to 1. Many commenters burdened the significance of self-custody via chilly wallets. Some urged decentralized exchanges (DEXs) as a real different.

“Ye, anytime you purchase bitcoin on an trade and go away it there, the trade is the center man. You don’t actually personal it till you are taking it off the trade,” mentioned the Bitcoin Convention. “The one solution to bypass the “intermediary” is to purchase straight out of your chilly pockets.”

These tweets have been amongst Ye’s Friday morning flurry of tweets on X, his first in a while. Round three posts have been about crypto. In one other submit, he questioned, “WHEN PEOPLE MAKE ALL THAT MONEY WITH A COIN IS THAT CASH OR CONCEPT.”

Most of his different posts contained quite a few antisemitic remarks, together with reward for Hitler and the assertion “I’m a Nazi.” He additionally touched on different matters, claiming his help for Sean “Diddy” Combs was “egocentric,” and falsely accusing Elon Musk of stealing his “Nazi Swag” on the inauguration.

Ye has a historical past of spreading hateful rhetoric on the platform, leading to a number of suspensions, together with one in December 2022 for antisemitic content material.

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