Crypto Influencers Pump Up Markets With $105,000 Tweets

By day, Paul Angus is an engineer. But by night, he’s Cryptonomatron: a producer of hot takes on the latest initial coin offerings who has more than 8,000 subscribers on YouTube. The 43-year-old Scot’s online alter-ego is mostly a labor of love, yet it sometimes comes with an added perk: payment in digital tokens.

That’s thanks to the thriving but murky world of cryptocurrency “bounty campaigns,” where social media influencers get paid to promote ICOs by the entrepreneurs (and in some cases scammers) behind the offerings. The practice isn’t new -- crypto celebrity John McAfee has long been a promoter-for-hire, saying in March that he charged $105,000 per tweet. But the endorsements are playing an ever-bigger role in ICO marketing after Internet giants including Google, Facebook and Twitter moved to ban cryptocurrency advertisements this year.