TheStory
California DJ, Steve Aoki, approved his BitClout account for verification via a Twitter post on March 25th. As the highest-grossing North American artist in the dance genre back in 2012, Steve still sells big tickets to shows but has been waning on digital streams in recent years. Like most major artists, Aoki joined the platform but left the account domant since verification. But that still hasn’t preventing major trading on the $STEVEAOKI coin.
TheNode
Due to Aoki’s uber early verification (likely putting him within the inner circles of BitClout’s Angel investors), it’s difficult to explore whether his coin was pumped just prior to account verification or through the launch news of BitClout in general. For some reason, trade data cannot be accessed before 3/25 which makes it difficult to come to any conclusion, but either way the coin landed above $11k post-verification craze.
The first massive sell-off on 3/26 was led by BitCloutFucks, ArtofWar, StevenSeagal, and of course, anonymous accounts. After the sell-off settled at less than half the peak value, the anonymous accounts began aping back in with $100K plus buys to bring the coin right back to the $11k peak where it slowly declined.
A second Twitter post by Aoki on April 5th, seemingly to help boost his coin price looked to have little to no effect.
Then May 23rd, you guessed it, an anonymous account tanked the coin with a $200k+ sale bringing it down to the $3k range. Sadly there isn’t much to learn in this case other than to not follow the leader, because the leader is usually an anonymous account looking to take advantage of the little guys.