As the NFT bubble continues to grow, another project has just entered the game: BitClout, a social crypto-exchange (a network, if you like) in which people can buy and sell tokens entirely based on a person's — mostly a celeb or influencer's — reputation.
On the network, NFTs are called Creator Coins and they represent a popular identity. The value of the Creator Coins relies entirely on the celebrity's popularity, meaning that the value can also rise and fall depending on whether that celeb does something great or something dumb.
Per its own explainer, "BitClout is a new type of social network that lets you speculate on people and posts with real money, and it’s built from the ground up as its own custom blockchain. Its architecture is similar to Bitcoin, only it can support complex social network data like posts, profiles, follows, speculation features, and much more at significantly higher throughput and scale. Like Bitcoin, BitClout is a fully open-source project and there is no company behind it — it’s just coins and code."
Naturally (and unfortunately) when chatting about celebs and crypto, Elon Musk's name pops up. On March 26, reports stated that the coin representing the Tesla CEO/self-titled "Technoking" was trading for $68,000. People have created Creator Coins for Kim Kardashian, Justin Bieber, Kanye West, Ariana Grande, and Billie Eilish, too. It's not clear whether any of these celebs gave their consent for their names to be used — but probably not.
"The owner of a reserved profile can claim their profile by navigating to their profile and hitting a button to Tweet their BitClout public key," the explanation continues. "When they do this, they gain full access to the account, as well as a percentage of the creator coins associated with their profile (see Founder Rewards). Only the owner of the Twitter account associated with a reserved profile can claim it."
Read about this in-depth here.
