Circle Welcomes DJ Khaled to ‘Team USDC’ and Crypto Twitter Is Furious

Circle, the issuer behind the USDC stablecoin, welcomed rapper DJ Khaled to “team USDC” in a post on X on Monday—and Crypto Twitter lost its collective mind. But it’s probably not what it seems.

Here’s what happened, and what appears to have caused the drama: USDC’s official X account posted a photo of DJ Khaled wearing a Chelsea jersey with “USDC by Circle” across the chest, captioned “Another one,” a nod to his signature catchphrase. About four hours later, Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire shared it with a note addressed to the rapper: “DJ Khaled welcome to team USDC.”

Nothing in either post announces a sponsorship, an ambassador role, or any money. It reads more like a cheeky nod. Circle is Chelsea’s official front-of-shirt sponsor, and Khaled turns up at the club through a separate door: Chelsea’s Roc Nation announcement in May involved DJ Khaled as a promotional stunt.

But direct sponsorship or not, Crypto Twitter wasn’t having it, given DJ Khaled’s checkered history in crypto.

“Please don’t work with scammers like this,” Joseph Schiarizzi posted on X. “You really want people who have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines to the SEC for illegally not disclosing payments they received for promoting ICOs representing your brand?”

Schiarizzi was referring to the scandal involving the fraudulent Centra ICO. The founders behind Centra went to jail way back in 2020. DJ Khaled, among many other celebrities, promoted the token—and Khaled paid over $150,000 in fines to the SEC for not disclosing it was a paid deal.

So, you could be forgiven for thinking DJ Khaled was being paid to promote USDC, and maybe not disclosing it again, and for publicly chastising Circle, a billion-dollar publicly listed company, for associating with the rapper. But that doesn’t appear to be what’s going on. Still, Crypto Twitter is big mad. After all, the internet never forgets.

Pseudonymous crypto sleuth Wazz Crypto went sarcastic, suggesting Circle sponsor Kim Kardashian next, because she’s an “outspoken advocate” of stablecoins that “lines up perfectly” with the brand.

For those who don’t get the joke, the SEC ordered Kardashian to pay $1.26 million in penalties, disgorgement and interest in 2022 for promoting the EthereumMax token on Instagram without disclosing a $250,000 payment.

Taylor Monahan, formerly of Metamask, went hard: “Circle really hired the guy who was charged with promoting one of the only ICO scams that was so stupid, so blatantly fraudulent, so criminal that it was written up in NYTimes and then promptly prosecuted by DOJ and SEC?” she posted on X.

For the record, the SEC and DOJ never charged Khaled with fraud, just to avoid any possible confusion. The case against the rapper was about an undisclosed payment.

In September 2017, Khaled had 12.4 million Instagram followers when he posted a photo of himself with a Centra Tech debit card, per the order, calling it “the ultimate winner in Cryptocurrency debit cards” and telling them: “Get your CTR tokens now!”

CTR was the token from Centra’s ICO—an initial coin offering, a fundraiser where a startup sells its own digital tokens to the public, like a stock sale without the stock. Centra paid Khaled $50,000 for the post, per the SEC, and he didn’t tell his followers. The law says that if someone pays you to promote an investment, you have to say so, because otherwise an ad can pass for an honest tip.

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The product was fiction. Prosecutors said the Visa and Mastercard partnerships behind Centra’s crypto card were fake, and so was its CEO, a “Michael Edwards” with a Harvard MBA who didn’t exist.

Centra raised over $25 million. Co-founder Robert Farkas pleaded guilty and got one year and one day; Sohrab Sharma got eight years and had to forfeit $36 million. Netflix later made a documentary, Bitconned, about the Centra scam.

Khaled settled with the SEC and paid the fine. Khaled’s two-year agreement not to take pay for promoting securities expired on November 29, 2020, so he’s more than welcome to strike deals with any crypto company he wants—and Crypto Twitter will be right there to call it out, no doubt.