Khamzat Chimaev accused of pump-and-dumping his own ‘Smash’ cryptocoin

Here’s your regular reminder to be careful when it comes to cryptocoin investing, even if that cryptocoin is being pushed by your favorite UFC fighter.

Khamzat Chimaev is now being accused of participating in a ‘crypto rug pull’ after encouraging his followers to buy a new Solana-based memecoin called Smash. “Borz” pushed Smash across multiple social media networks, driving the token’s value up to 0.01 SOL, or $1.35 in antiquated US dollars.

What happened next will shock you.

Not even 24 hours after the big push from Chimaev, there was a massive sell-off resulting in SMASH dropping over 91% of it’s value to 0.004 SOL ($0.53) per token. High volatility in memecoins is nothing new, but people investigating the coin’s blockchain are now accusing Khamzat of orchestrating a pump and dump.

Noted crypto investigator ZachXBT explained.

“Yesterday, Khamzat Chimaev and his team dropped a cryptocoin called Smash and made multiple videos promoting it to his followers,” he said. “And in under 24 hours, he rugs the coin and steals up to $1,000,000 from his fans that invested in his coin.”

“And of course, the genius’s honest team and himself immediately got exposed for it and people were able to track the scam right back to him with the exact wallet addresses that he used. Khamzat went on to immediately delete all of the videos that he made promoting the scam right after he rugged.”

“It’s just sad to see someone go from being on the verge of super stardom to scamming his own fans for peanuts,” ZachXBT concluded. “Because he likely only got a very small fraction of what was stolen.”

Now it’s worth noting that we aren’t forensic crypto analysts over here so we can’t definitively confirm or deny ZachXBT’s claims. But in a Twitter post he lists the specific blockchain transactions that show it was an insider scam.

According to CoinTelegraph, “at least 71% of [Smash] supply can be directly linked to insider wallets that were funded by the same Ethereum address that funded the Smash token’s developer address on Solana.”

In other words, the same entity that set up Smash also bought up the majority of Smash tokens — estimated around 712 million. Khamzat then pushed the coin, causing the value to go up. Then came the dump, which ZachXBT estimates allowed whoever was behind this caper to walk away with roughly a million dollars.

That’s not big money in the crypto world, but not bad for 24 hours work. And all it cost is Khamzat Chimaev’s reputation.