SafeMoon (SFM-USD) is a cryptocurrency with a seemingly broad focus. Its website talks of building blockchain, metaverse and e-commerce projects, philanthropy and other such goals. It’s quite the ambitious agenda.
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However, in the crypto world, SafeMoon has a less than stellar reputation. It came out to a bunch of hype last year and initially skyrocketed in value. At its peak, SafeMoon reached more than $0.00001 per token. It’s now at $0.00000057. Mind the zeros there.
If you strip the first zeros off those prices, SafeMoon hit more than 100 per token last year and is at just 5.7 now, or a more than 94% decline in value.
SafeMoon Carries On, But the Project Is Losing Steam
Recently, SafeMoon migrated from V1 to V2 of its platform. The developers stopped support for V1 of SafeMoon, and the price and trading volume has continued to dry up. However, SafeMoon V2 is also down sharply in 2022.
It appears that there simply isn’t much organic demand for anything related to the SafeMoon ecosystem. Sure, the project found buyers when folks like Dave Portnoy and Jake Paul were talking about SafeMoon last year. Portnoy, you may recall, invested $40,000 in SafeMoon saying that “I have no idea how this works,” but seemingly thinking it was a good marketing stunt regardless. And, in terms of return on investment, that was probably a winning trade.
Other influencers, however, offered much more promotional and less frank assessments of SafeMoon’s future. And while the influencers are probably doing fine, some of their followers surely have regrets with the price down more than 95% from its peak. Which leads to the lawsuits.
The Lawsuits Are Already Being Filed
As is often the case when an investment collapses, people are now turning to lawyers. Plaintiffs filed a class action lawsuit against various celebrity and social media promoters of SafeMoon last month.
Plaintiffs allege that SafeMoon is a “Ponzi” scheme. And that it relied on tweets and other forms of promotion from celebrities such as Jake Paul, Nick Carter, Soulja Boy and Lil Yachty to attract investors into the scheme. The lawsuit cites postings from the likes of Paul, who have touted various cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) over the past year. This pattern of activity might give investors the sense that this made SafeMoon a trustworthy and dependable investment.
Instead, however, the lawsuit claims that SafeMoon’s development team has generally failed to achieve the development goals it laid out in its roadmap, such as building a crypto exchange. This, the plaintiffs contend, essentially turned SafeMoon into a slow-moving “rug pull” operation. Allegedly, celebrity promoters such as Paul could sell SafeMoon at high prices while giving followers the impression that the project had a bright future.
Influencers such as Portnoy who openly said they didn’t understand the fundamentals of the project are likely on better footing from a liability perspective. For those who touted SafeMoon too aggressively, however, we’ll see what the legal system ends up thinking. In any case, it could be an interesting legal precedent for the crypto market, which now faces a huge wave of rug pulls and failed projects, particularly in the NFT space.
SafeMoon Verdict
Put aside the celebrity drama and massive price crash in SafeMoon for a minute. There’s arguably an even bigger problem as far as it relates to SafeMoon as an ongoing investment. As our Stavros Georgiadis recently documented, Safemoon simply doesn’t provide much utility to the world.
The biggest identifiable feature of SafeMoon is that holders receive bonuses when other people sell the token. This, in effect, makes it easier to justify holding an asset — even if it may potentially be worthless — since there is seemingly a passive income associated with holding onto the tokens.
At the end of the day, however, is SafeMoon worth anything? That’s very much an open question right now. If so, then holding onto more SafeMoon tokens isn’t necessarily an achievement. It’d seemingly be better to own fewer tokens of a crypto-project with a more promising future.
SafeMoon can put all the doubters to bed by delivering on its project road map and bringing new features into the world. This would make SafeMoon an actually desirable holding and help return more trading volume to the token. Until there’s much sign of that actually happening, however, SafeMoon is an easy avoid.
On the date of publication, Ian Bezek did not have (either directly or indirectly) any positions in the securities mentioned in this article. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the writer, subject to the InvestorPlace.com Publishing Guidelines.