This article is from the old yuppie (WeChat public account id: laoyapi).

Public figures have recently poured into the NFT world. The old yuppies have reported the news that many celebrities own NFTs in previous public account articles. For those who have been eating melons in the entertainment circle for a long time, the first thing they often think of when they see this craze The question is: did they really pay for those ape avatars?

If a celebrity gets an NFT for free, the most likely motivation is that they use it to create buzz, driving demand for the item through endorsements. The question then becomes: What forms of celebrity advertising are legal? Also, what the hell is going on with Justin Bieber's Bored Ape?

Let's start simple. Take Gwyneth Paltrow, for example, whose new avatar is an NFT from the Flower Girl series. Now, Paltrow's endorsements are big business, and it's part of how she's built Goop as a lifestyle brand. For example, what do you like, what do you buy, and what do you show off? What is the degree of legality.

But cryptocurrencies are very public, while other parts of the Goop brand are not. In order for Paltrow's NFT profile picture to show up, her Twitter account had to be associated with a specific wallet. Clicking on her avatar will display the contract address of the NFT on Etherscan, through which you can calculate her wallet address. And one of the features of cryptocurrency wallets is that it is possible to transfer things"airdrop "to any known wallet without the involvement of the owner. Airdrops are an important part of marketing a cryptocurrency project and are often used to build a user base.

So, once Paltrow's wallet is known, any NFT project can simply airdrop the NFT to that wallet. If she gets an NFT that she likes and wants to use it as her new avatar, does she have to reveal that she got it for free?

Because celebrity marketing is so powerful, the FTC has proposed a series of regulations around influencer endorsements on social media platforms. Posters are responsible for disclosing that what they received was an offer as a promotion, or that they were paid to advertise a product. Under these guidelines, any financial, personal, employment or family relationships must be disclosed.

So I emailed the FTC asking what this means for airdrop. FTC spokeswoman Juliana Gruenwald said the agency cannot comment on any specific celebrity or situation, but there is a general principle at work: If consumers may not know about the relationship between a marketer and a celebrity, they should. disclosure. "Thus, relevant questions include whether a celebrity actually endorses a product or service on behalf of a marketer, whether the endorser's followers expect any connection, and whether knowing that connection affects followers' perception of the product or service," she wrote in an emailed statement. The endorsement view.

There are also some situations where celebrities do not need to disclose to the public, such as advertising. Wiggle your toes and think about it, and Matt Damon gets paid to compare trading cryptocurrencies to the Wright Brothers building airplanes for Crypto.com. But receiving something for free is murkier: a celebrity can receive an NFT on their birthday without any connection between them and the NFT’s marketer. Gruenwald pointed out that when a person receives payment, a gift of a product endorsed, or an in-kind payment in exchange for an endorsement, this needs to be disclosed to the public.

So if I have an NFT project to promote, it might be worth my while to AirDrop some gifts to the stars, in case any of them like it and talk about it. This doesn't seem to violate the FTC's guidelines any more than gift bags at award shows do, but it does make it harder for consumers to tell who they can trust.

Let's be honest: stars exist to sell stuff, which is why they were invented by 20th century Hollywood. They are also useful in the business world. Financial vehicles known as special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) already have star sponsors such as Golden State Warriors' Stephen Curry, Hall of Fame basketball player Shaquille O'Neal, former House Speaker Paul Ryan and Moneyball Billy Bean. Celebrities make fundraising and media attention easier. It makes no difference to the public.

In fact, that may be truer to the public than anything else. That's because successful public-facing projects imply a commitment to the community, and stars often come with their fans.

Assuming CAA has at least one person who is passionate about NFTs, that explains the investment. This person is likely to have dinner with some star clients and talk excitedly about their new hobby, NFT collections, leading the star himself to decide to take up the new hobby as well. This is different from CAA having a celebrity to promote its investment, which may require disclosure.

For example. When investor Katie Haun, then an investor in the a16z cryptocurrency (now out of the loop herself), had dinner with a group of women in the entertainment industry, it wasn't reflected on the blockchain. If it wasn't for Fortune's coverage, I wouldn't have known about it at all. That one dinner was enough to get Mindy Kaling, and Paltrow, into NFTs.

These kinds of relationships don't really fall under the purview of the FTC, although the results can be lucrative. Star NFT owners can make projects more valuable by associating themselves with them. For example, Reese Witherspoon endorsed the "Women's World" NFT project in October. In January, the program generated more than $40 million in just two weeks, thanks in part to star sales.

A transaction graph of wallets associated with Witherspoon’s NFT reveals a complex network of funds. Links between other wallets, which in turn fund Witherspoon’s wallet, suggest that one entity could have access to at least $180 million in on-chain assets. Those who produced the roadmap believe Witherspoon violated the FTC's disclosure guidelines. It's possible, but I'm not entirely convinced.

There is another interpretation of this transaction graph, and it doesn't involve violating FTC rules. This is likely to protect Witherspoon's financial privacy on the public blockchain, since one of the downsides of being a star is that people love prying eyes. If Witherspoon was using a service that attempted to anonymize some of her transactions, as many stars use shell companies to buy properties, she probably wouldn't need to disclose. But the transaction network itself is not enough to definitively tell what happened.

There is one service that comes to mind right away. MoonPay, Snoop Dogg, Diplo and Jimmy Fallon have all used the service. Spokesman Justin Hamilton said Witherspoon was not a MoonPay customer, so a possible explanation for Witherspoon's transaction graph was off the table.

But it could explain the strange transactions of other stars, because many stars, including Paltrow, use MoonPay to bypass the tedious part of buying NFT. MoonPay's star service grew out of CEO Ivan Soto-Wright's social circle, Hamilton said. Soto-Wright keeps getting calls from celebrity friends asking to help him break into the NFT space, like a C-suite customer service representative (Soto-Wright has this to say:"That's cool, but it's impossible to scale. ) So the company -- primarily a B2B connection between fiat and cryptocurrencies -- built a consumer-facing service.

MoonPay’s concierge service is not for those already comfortable in the cryptocurrency ecosystem. It's for those who are just getting their feet wet. Thus, users tell MoonPay what asset they want. MoonPay buys it, helps customers build their own wallets, does"know your customer"and anti-money laundering compliance, and then put the assets into the customer's wallet. They then bill the customer in fiat currency. That's a big deal for customers, and it's part of MoonPay's broader, non-consumer-focused business: getting people to pay for digital assets with their credit cards.

This also explains why some celebrity wallets seem to show that a celebrity got an NFT for free. They didn't get it for free, but the payment happened off the blockchain record because it was paid in almighty dollars.

MoonPay already has a celebrity endorsement deal: videos with Post Malone and The Weeknd. But all those celebs you see tweeting about concierge services, they're just happy customers, Hamilton said. And the tweets do not violate FTC rules.

Justin Bieber is another MoonPay client. But his non-MoonPay transactions look even weirder, but I'm not going to pretend I know what's going on.

A wallet associated with Bieber, not his MoonPay wallet, bought the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT for 500 ETH, about $1.3 million at settlement. However, this is much higher than the reserve price of 100ETH set by the seller. Bieber posted an image of the NFT on his Instagram, but didn't say he bought it.

I point out Bieber's language because I'm not sure the money came from Bieber himself. (Some people think Bieber didn't buy his apes, based on the same evidence that I don't think is certain). Leads to the transaction flowed to another wallet linked to an NFT project called InBetweeners. Bieber got an InBetweeners NFT giveaway in December and has since bought more. It's unclear what the relationship between InBetweeners and Bieber is. Did someone else buy Bieber an ape as payment-in-kind for his promotional services with InBetweeners? Is Bieber relying on his friends to cut deals for him in order to maintain some of his financial privacy? Or some other reason? And how does all of this fit within the FTC's influencer endorsement framework?

Let's say you don't think what Bieber did was legal. There's no way to know for sure other than to wait for an FTC investigation. When it comes to questionable endorsements, the means of recourse available to the average person are virtually non-existent.

Talking about this, the more I think about celebrities and NFT, the more crazy I think this status quo is. Take Cozimo de Medici's Twitter account, for example, which has fewer than 200,000 followers as of this writing. Last September, the account said it would disclose"my real life stardom", to make people pay more attention to NFT. Then America's stoner uncle Snoop tweeted from his own account that he was Cozimo de Medici, which may or may not be true. Both Slate and Vice claimed that the Cozimo account's tweets indicated that Snoop was not Cozimo.

Just for fun, let's assume de' Medici's account isn't Snoop. In this hypothetical situation, yes, deception occurred. So, what then? The FTC guidelines don't seem to be a good fit. The guidelines recommend that if a celebrity endorses something on behalf of a marketer, the relationship should be disclosed if it's not obvious. But for starters: here... what is being endorsed? a pseudonym? This pseudonymous investment? Does being associated with a celebrity in this indirect way violate any FTC rules? What happened?

The FTC guidelines don't seem to be a good fit. The guidelines recommend that if a celebrity endorses something on behalf of a marketer, the relationship should be disclosed if it is not obvious. But here... what's the endorsement? an alias? Investing in this pseudonym? Does being associated with a celebrity in this indirect way violate any FTC rules? What happened?

In today's article, we only discussed the influence of celebrities. The old yuppie reminds everyone that not only celebrities, but also Internet celebrities, Internet celebrities, and even platform anchors may have such influences, which will affect your judgment.