Celebrity-endorsed NFTs leave some investors 'financially crippled' [View all]

[Demovictory9]

When Floyd Mayweather started touting an obscure NFT project on Twitter this year, Tyler jumped at the investment opportunity.

Mayweather, a boxing legend, had already served as Tyler’s “biggest inspiration” in his martial arts training. But Tyler was also looking for investment opportunities and figured Mayweather, who often calls himself “Money May,” was worth listening to.

“What I need everybody to do right now: Go get a Bored Bunny NFT,” said Mayweather, dressed in a Louis Vuitton vest with a diamond bracelet, a necklace and a gold watch. “You’re hearing it from the one and only Floyd ‘Make-That-Money’ Mayweather.”

Tyler, 35, a property manager whose family runs a small Miami-based trucking company, said he put together about $12,000 with the help of his mother and bought the nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, digital tokens that convey ownership of digital images. In this case, the project was a series of images of rabbits similar in nature to the popular Bored Ape Yacht Club images that helped fuel a boom in NFT art projects.

Those NFTs are now worth far less than Tyler paid.

“This basically financially crippled me,” said Tyler, who asked to be identified by only his first name because he fears online trolls who ridicule unsuccessful NFT investors. Now, especially with inflation, Tyler said, he is struggling to afford gas for his car and groceries to eat. He said he feels Mayweather and the other promoters “took their payouts and moved on while everybody who scraped by to invest in their futures got robbed.”

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Tyler Lengyel, 29, a Bored Bunny investor from Texas, spent about $6,000 on Bored Bunny NFTs when the tokens were minted in January. It was around that time that he was leaving his job in sales management for personal reasons. Within weeks, he suddenly had no income, a depleted savings account and NFTs that were nearly worthless. He found temporary work at an Amazon warehouse and then started driving for Uber. This month, while Mayweather flaunted his $42,500 winnings from a different $10,000 boxing bet on Instagram, Lengyel had to sell his car to help cover his bills through July.

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/celebrity-endorsed-nfts-leave-investors-financially-crippled-rcna27705