One of YouTube’s biggest stars, US amateur boxer Logan Paul (23.2 million subscribers), has been promoting a crypto “asset” called Dink Doink. And it hasn’t been going down well with other YouTubers.

Supposedly the brainchild of Jake Broido, a roommate of Paul’s, Dink Doink is essentially a useless meme coin, apparently inspired by the success of Dogecoin and Shiba Inu.

There’s no canine hook with this one, though. Instead, its creators have gone with a weird, googly-eyed image of a springy mascot that looks like a shameless South Park rip-off.

After this tweet from Paul, the crypto mooned almost 40,000% in value, reaching an all-time high of US$0.00000000227726 on the same day.

Dink Doink, which has a maximum supply of 10 quadrillion tokens (yep), subsequently fell off a cliff big time, with its price taking a 99.3% dump over the course of two weeks. It’s since recovered somewhat, but is still sitting about 85% down from its peak and is currently ranked 3214 on CoinMarketCap.
 

Hammered by fellow YouTubers

Paul has been particularly savaged for his Dink Doink-shilling efforts on social media by two other prominent YouTubers – iDubbz (7.5m subs) and Coffeezilla (529K), as reported by Crypto Slate.

iDubbz has alleged Dink Doink is a “scam”, and feels Paul has been irresponsible in promoting the project.

“I find it so annoying how un-transparent they are about this,” said the YouTuber in a video he posted on July 12.

A “pump and dump” might be the kind of scam iDubbz is referring to. Pump and dumps are schemes where manipulators collaborate to inflate the price of an asset by creating buzz and then sell the asset in a coordinated effort, dumping the price on unsuspecting buyers who FOMOed in late.

Unfortunately, it’s an all-too-common practice in crypto, which gives the space a bad name and infuriates the many good actors and innovators trying to promote ground-breaking technology and a legitimate asset class.

Coffeezilla went so far as to accuse Paul of being the coin’s actual creator despite presenting himself as a mere investor.

“In general, he presents himself as an interested but unaffiliated investor in this coin,” said Coffezilla in a recent video post. “But it turns out this is incredibly misleading … because in a podcast [Steven Steele’s crypto YouTube channel] with the Dink Doink CEO, he said Logan Paul created the thing.”
 

Breaking down barriers

Speaking to Business Insider on Wednesday, Broido said that Paul is not “part of the official team” and is only “participating as a creative,” though he admits Paul was given “some tokens for this project when it first started.”

In the same interview, Broido seemed defiantly bullish about Dink Doink, revealing his goal is to turn it into a sustained success – a “long-term project that’s going to lead to a movie”.

“I seriously believe I was put on this earth to knock down the barrier between entertainment and crypto,” said Paul’s s**tcoin-spruiking roommate.