John McAfee is charging $105,000 for tweets promoting ICOs
The antivirus software pioneer and self-proclaimed "crypto visionary" sells tweets promoting initial coin offerings.
- Best New Journalist 2019 Australian IT Journalism Awards
John McAfee has played up his eccentricities for a long time. More recently, he's been playing up cryptocurrencies too.
Ah, McAfee, you've done it again.
John McAfee, the antivirus software pioneer whose bio includes a murder accusation, has let it be known that he's charging $105,000 per tweet promoting a cryptocurrency or an initial coin offering (ICO).
Using his lucrative Twitter account, the self-proclaimed "crypto visionary" tweeted to his 811,000 followers a link to The McAfee Crypto Team website on how his promotional tweets work.
We finally wrote down how our promotional tweets work. It's self aggrandizing and ego stroking for us, however, if you're planning an ICO, trying to boost a coin or want to shine a light on your latest project, you should overlook our swollen egos and see:https://t.co/O6TBWrxDzm
— John McAfee (@officialmcafee) March 30, 2018
"Within the cryptocurrency industry, nothing can match the power of a McAfee tweet," the page reads. "Frequently, a single tweet has resulted in more than a million dollars of investment into an ICO, and multiple currencies have increased more than 100 percent in price from a single tweet."
An ICO allows potential buyers to invest in a cryptocurrency before launch. ICOs are used to help fund the development of a new currency. If the technology is legitimate, it can be good to get in early before it starts getting traded freely on exchanges.
McAfee began weighing in on cryptocurrencies last year by tweeting his "coin of the day," which may have resulted in small spikes in a coin's value. When his Twitter account was hacked in December to promote lesser-known cryptocurrencies, McAfee reduced his endorsements to once a week.
Whether McAfee's Twitter account does sway cryptocurrency markets has been put to the test. Recently, over the course of three weeks, Motherboard tracked McAfee's tweets about alternative cryptocurrencies. It found that their market value did shoot up. Burstcoin's value, for example, jumped 350 percent.