A newly created token BEN is ready to fight against the leading meme coins for market cap after its creator Ben.eth shared the token's contract address and link to the Telegram community on May 7.
Today, Ben 'Bitboy' Armstrong, one of the most well-known crypto bloggers with 1.4 million subscribers and a million Twitter audience, confirmed that he is participating in BEN DAO and boosted the hype around the project. This helped the coin increase its value from about $0.0000000348 noted yesterday to $0.000000122 at the time of publication. Although the current information about the token's market capitalization is not known, its trading volume in the last 24 hours amounted to $76,067,693.53. The maximum supply of BEN is 420,690,000,000,000.
The BEN memecoin uses the image of one of dog Benjamin, one of the main characters of the animated show Talking Tom & Friends TV aired from 2014 until the end of 2021.
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Judging by Twitter activity related to the project, it is obvious BEN's founders hope to surpass the recent success of the PEPE coin launched in late April. PEPE, the coin that refers to the cartoon character Pepe the Frog created by cartoonist Matt Furie, saw its price rise over 2,000% between April 17 and May 1 as several exchange platforms such as Bitget, MEXC Global, Huobi, Gate.io and OKX listed the memecoin. Finally, Binance's listing announcement on May 5 drove the token to its record price of $0.0000046 from $0.000001223 the token had on May 1.
Armstrong's role in the BEN project is not obvious, as his support for the memecoin made many crypto users believe he is one of the token's founders.
"People think I launched the token. I had nothing to do with the creation. The creator, founder, and LP holder is Ben.eth on Twitter. This coin was spurred out of a telegram group consisting of only people named Ben. There are several high profile Bens in there like Ben Goertzel, Ben Lakeoff, Ben Noble and other respected Bens in the space," the crypto blogger explained in his interview with news platform Decrypt, adding that he only joined the team that had already created the coin.
Still, this clarification creates even more mystery around the token, which has been hyped by other tweets from Armstrong and Ben.eth. For example, the blogger shared a post from Ben.eth today encouraging crypto users to invest in BEN.
"Sell all your meme coins for BEN. BEN is more than a meme coin. It is an attention economy coin. That is the team's life's work. Bitboy Crypto and I spent years of our lives bringing attention to crypto. Now it's time for BEN," Ben.eth said, emphasizing Armstrong's early involvement in the project.
At the same time, the description of BEN's Telegram channel says, "BEN is the first of its kind influencer meme token. With every BEN token, you get a small piece of me."
Meanwhile, Ben.eth is also trying to create a negative impression of PEPE to draw crypto users' attention to BEN by posting tweets criticizing the famous memecoin. Today, BEN's founder tweeted, "PEPE has shady backroom deals happening now, It's obvious."
Interestingly, Armstrong has no qualms about advertising speculative tokens despite the ongoing lawsuit regarding the promotion collapsed crypto exchange FTX. In addition, Bitboy Crypto has been recently blocked from online interactions with Adam Moskowitz, the attorney leading the lawsuit.
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Although the crypto influencer still has many followers on social media, many members of the crypto community are now rather skeptical of Armstrong's trustworthiness. For them, Bitboy Crypto's involvement in promoting BEN is more of an anti-advertising campaign. The distrust went so far that crypto users did not even believe Armstrong's warnings about fake staking sites for BEN.
When the blogger tweeted today, "Apparently someone set up a fake staking site for $BEN and many people were tricked and lost their $BEN. We are looking at blacklisting the addresses directly associated with the scam site, but doesn't seem like it's possible with the contract," it fueled even more distrust among crypto investors. Some of them called the blogger "a scamfluencer" as they believe Armstrong himself is responsible for the scam.
