Tiger King Crypto Price Spikes After Dogecoin Youtuber Matt Wallace Says He's Buying It

A cryptocurrency based on the popular Netflix docuseries Tiger King jumped in price after being mentioned by a crypto YouTuber.

Tiger King Coin, which claims to be the "official coin of the Tiger King," was launched in May this year on the Ethereum blockchain.

At around 5:45 a.m. EDT on Monday morning the token was worth about $0.000004, up more than 68 percent over the past 24 hours.

The trading volume, or the total value of tokens traded in the past 24 hours, was up more than 280 percent to around $235,000, CoinMarketCap data showed. The market cap of Tiger King Coin is unclear.

The token's sudden rise came a few hours after cryptocurrency and Dogecoin YouTuber Matt Wallace tweeted about it on Sunday night. Wallace has around 223,000 Twitter followers.

Wallace said at 5:25 p.m. BST: "I feel like Tiger King Coin is going to go crazy when season 2 of Tiger King Comes. I am buying it up fast."

He then went on to state that the token is one of his three largest cryptocurrency holdings. It is unclear if the token's rise in price was directly caused by Wallace's tweets.

The website of Tiger King Coin claims the token has been "endorsed by the man himself," referring to Joe Exotic, the controversial zookeeper and focus of the Tiger King series.

Exotic, whose real name is Joseph Maldonado-Passage, was sentenced to 22 years in prison in 2020 on counts of animal abuse, including shooting tigers, and murder-for-hire.

In April 2020 the Humane Society of the United States said facilities like Exotic's were "cruel."

Newsweek has contacted Maldonado-Passage's official Twitter account for comment.

Tiger King Coin states that Exotic has received a percentage of the total token supply, and that "every buy will increase the value of his bag."

The token's roadmap shows that developers were aiming to launch a non-fungible token marketplace in June 2021, though this doesn't appear to have materialized.

It's not uncommon for seemingly obscure tokens to suddenly leap in price for reasons such as high-profile support.

Dangers and Risks of Trading

Tokens can sink in price as quickly as they rise. Experts have previously warned Newsweek about the risks and dangers associated with cryptocurrency trading.

Last week, a cryptocurrency token called Baby Doge Coin jumped in price after Elon Musk tweeted "Baby Doge, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo"—though it is unclear if he was referencing Baby Doge Coin or just Dogecoin, the popular meme token he is known to support.

And in May, Musk tweeted a photo of a sign that spelled out the word "Starbase" in glowing letters, possibly to highlight a SpaceX rocket test site.

That tweet caused an apparently unrelated cryptocurrency sharing the same name to rocket in price from $0.005 to $0.2, though it soon plummeted and returned to about $0.01.