iShowSpeed found himself at odds with YouTube fans after they called him out for promoting The Paradox Metaverse, an open-world, action-adventure game that allows people to earn Paradox Coins, a form of cryptocurrency, for completing missions—as long as they purchase the company’s NFTs.
Its branding was plastered all over his stream in the form of banners, hoodies, and t-shirts—one of which directly encouraged fans to buy into the cryptocurrency. He was also giving away signed PS5 consoles throughout the stream to promote it.
However, iShowSpeed’s YouTube audience wasn’t impressed.
They bombarded him with messages via donations and chat accusing him of trying to scam them in the form of a ‘pump and dump scheme,’ which means inflating the price of a crypto coin—in this case, the Paradox Coin.
Eventually, the influx of comments started to get on the YouTuber’s nerves, so he clapped back.
“Mods, do something! Because I’m really getting pissed off, bro,” he said. “Chill the fuck out, bro. Seriously, dog. Because y’all really getting on my nerves, bro! The fact that y’all would ever even think of me like that. I don’t even know if y’all are trolls or not, but the fact that you guys would ever think of me like that is kind of fucked up. It’s kind of making my feelings hurt.”
Clips of the incident, which have now been removed from social media, along with the VOD being shortened to only show a third of the stream (and without chat), sparked more outrage on social media.
“Bro makes like $250,000 a month, why scam your audience? I don’t get it,” said one fan.
“This one is really fucked up. A site that offers $500 a week playing games four hours a day. The only thing you need to do is purchase their NFTs in order to get it. This isn’t even going to be a long-term scam, this is a complete pump and dump immediately. And they’re scamming low-income people who want to do this as a job,” said another.
The most bizarre thing about it, though, was Speed invited a Cristiano Ronaldo look-alike to help him promote it on stream. And he referred to him as if he were the real one (for a while), before revealing the jig to his fans.
The controversial incident happened days after Sky deleted multiple videos of Speed over what many believe was due to misogynistic comments he’s made in the past.
Published: Nov 16, 2022 10:46 pm