After Jake Paul became one of the celebrities charged by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for illegally promoting cryptocurrencies, many have started to wonder how much crypto the American social media personality and professional boxer actually held.
Although the specific numbers are unclear, Jake Paul is a known Bitcoin (BTC) enthusiast, claiming the flagship decentralized finance (DeFi) asset was the “best investment” of his life as he sat down for a chat with BitBoy Crypto in April 2021.
As he said back then:
“I invested in Bitcoin when it was $100 when I was 16 years old, and it was the craziest, best investment of my life. (…) Ever since that moment, I’ve sort of been involved in crypto and still investing to this day, buying Bitcoin, buying Ethereum (ETH).”
Bitcoin bet backfires?
However, one year later, during an episode of his ‘Impaulsive’ podcast with co-hosts George Janko and Mike Majlak, his older brother Logan revealed Jake had endured major financial losses as he had allegedly invested most of his wealth into the crypto market, which had subsequently crashed.
Indeed, as Janko touted Jake’s boxing career, stating that it was “going pretty well,” and Majlak stressed that “he made like $40 million last year,” Logan quickly jumped in to say that “it doesn’t matter; he put it all in crypto. (…) He’s poor.”
Interestingly, the YouTuber-turned-boxer had blamed US President Joe Biden for the “plummeting crypto prices” at the time, despite some commenters pointing out to him that Jake was the “one of the main dudes pumping and dumping” crypto.
Fraud accusations
It seems that one commenter, in particular, was referring to Paul’s support for the SafeMoon (SAFEMOON), now revamped as SafeMoon V2 (SFM) token, that faced security concerns and several scandals in 2022, including fraud lawsuits against the network’s executives and celebrity influencers who endorsed it and then allegedly sold their holdings.
Meanwhile, Jake Paul has been charged for illegally promoting Tron (TRX) and/or BitTorrent (BTT) without disclosing that he was compensated for it, alongside Lindsay Lohan, DeAndre Cortez Way (Soulja Boy), Austin Mahone, Michele Mason (Kendra Lust), Miles Parks McCollum (Lil Yachty), Shaffer Smith (Ne-Yo), and Aliaune Thiam (Akon).
Notably, crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun and three of his companies, Tron Foundation Limited, BitTorrent Foundation Ltd., and Rainberry Inc., also stand accused of the unregistered offer and sale of TRX and BTT as investments through multiple unregistered “bounty programs,” as Finbold reported on May 22.
