Sources: MoonPay gifted celebrities BAYC NFTs at the height of the crypto craze in late 2021; MoonPay says the NFTs weren't free and celebrities paid full price
The Block : Tweets: @basedkarbon and @rt_watson Tweets: @basedkarbon : Reminder: The average bored ape holder genuinely believed all these athletes and celebrities were just so drawn to the fivrr monkey drawings that they were purchasing them on their own https://twitter.com/... RT Watson / @rt_watson : MoonPay gifted Hollywood celebs Bored Apes to promote itself: SOURCES ☑️ For more than a year, observers have speculated... ☑️Now, sources told The Block that MoonPay gave some celebrities Bored Apes without expecting payment. w/ @RyanJamesWeeks https://www.theblock.co/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The Block's sourcing closes a loop that has been open for more than a year: observers long suspected the celebrity Bored Ape wave was manufactured, and the report lands alongside a paper trail that already looked coordinated — many promoting NFTs were tied to OpenSea investor Creative Artists Agency, and a VICE investigation mapped a paid-promotion market where middlemen push legal limits.
For MoonPay, the timing compounds an existing credibility problem: weeks earlier, sources said insiders including CEO Ivan Soto-Wright had cashed out $150M in shares during its November 2021 raise, and the company's own celebrity-studded $86.7M investment round at a $3.4B valuation now reads as part of the same promotional machinery.
First-order effects
- MoonPay enters a direct factual dispute with The Block over whether celebrities paid full price, with its denial now the only thing standing between it and an undisclosed-marketing narrative attached to the BAYC promotions of late 2021.
- Celebrities who publicly bought or promoted Bored Apes face renewed questions about whether their endorsements were purchased marketing, echoing the FTX-linked allegations around Sotheby's $24.4M Bored Ape trove covered by Vanity Fair.
Second-order effects
- Rivals in crypto payments can position themselves against MoonPay's promotion-heavy playbook just as the company reportedly pursues ~$100M stock acquisitions of DFlow and Sodot and a new institutional unit — deals where counterparty trust is the currency.
- Celebrity NFT endorsements get repriced across the board: talent agencies and promoters face pressure toward explicit disclosure, since the CAA-OpenSea entanglement already showed how representation and investment blurred the line.
Third-order effects
- If gifting-as-marketing becomes standard practice for crypto firms courting mainstream faces, regulators and platforms move toward treating celebrity token endorsements like any other paid promotion, formalizing rules the Dapp Centre-style gray market has skirted.
- The episode feeds the broader legitimacy gap between crypto companies and the public: when the visible buyers turn out to be compensated participants, retail confidence in both the assets (BAYC) and the intermediaries (MoonPay) structurally erodes.
The trend: Crypto's mainstream adoption playbook — celebrity endorsement as growth engine — is being unwound by reporting that exposes those endorsements as coordinated, paid marketing.