Keenon DequanRay Jackson, The rapper known as YG appears to boast that he has $30 million in bitcoin (BTC) in his latest music video..
The disclosure appears to be a possibly false assumption or unwise product placement, as a cold storage device from cryptocurrency wallet provider Ledger is featured prominently in the video. Ledger’s social media team immediately brought it up:
We see you! @YG knows how to secure those bags of #bitcoin … not your keys, not your coins.
— Ledger (@Ledger) February 11, 2022
We see you! @YG knows how to secure those bitcoin wallets… If it’s not your keys, it’s not your coins.
In one of the music video scenes for the song titled “Scared Money” with J. Cole and Moneybagg Yo, YG is seen holding a Ledger wallet near a smartphone that has a wallet app screen with over $30.6 million BTC on it.
Although the image could have been easily faked, rappers are well known for flaunting their wealth and success, especially in this song which has a theme centered around spending money, investing, and wearing half a million dollars worth of jewelry around their necks.
YG is a big proponent of BTC, and has mentioned owning digital gold in multiple other songs. as “Big Bank” from 2018, and also in an interview with RollingStone from mid-2021.
During that interview, YG said that he liked the simplicity of holding cryptocurrencies as he could invest his money in the asset class without being distracted from his music career.. He drew comparisons to the real estate market, where he would have to spend a lot of time working and learning to be successful.
“I love bitcoin […] I have Ethereum for a short time and also Dogecoin, but I have Bitcoin for about three years […] Bitcoin came along and it was like ‘what?’ and I can do it and it becomes that…” he said in reference to the asset price boom last year.
In a Reddit post on the r/Bitcoin Reddit community earlier today, users questioned YG’s massive BTC stack; “AvoidMyRange” stated that “the chance of all of these ending in 0 and the pennies ending in .00 is incredibly low. This is obviously false.”.
“It’s fake because it’s not even the design of the ledger app”user “AKeveryday” replied.
Other users saw the funny side of YG’s actions; Redditor Lexstell11 did the math for the Big Bank song lyrics, concluding that he did it when BTC was priced around $7,000.
“In YG’s song Big Bank, he says ‘I could buy red-soled shoes with crypto, 3 would pay for your entire semester…’ the song was released on 5/25/2018 when BTC was $7,459 at closing. So presumably YG paid $132,000, based on today’s conversion, for a girl’s semester at what I’m assuming was the University of Phoenix. I think about this a lot.”
Cryptocurrencies have attracted a strong cohort of rappers in recent years; Icons like Jay Z and NFT bull Snoop Dogg Dogg have made an impression by drawing attention to the industry. Other well-known figures who have jumped on the crypto bandwagon include Meek Mill, which bought Dogecoin (DOGE) amidst the hype last year; Nas, who tokenized his music as NFT earlier this year; and Post Malone, who included a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT in one of his recent music videos.
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