UFC fighter Khamzat Chimaev “was not involved” in SMASH Mimecoin and “knows as little about it as you do,” Chimaev’s manager Majidi Shamas said in a July 7 post to X. Shamas claimed that Chimaev decided to promote the coin without the fighter’s input after being “approached by a group of alleged fans.”
The statement comes days after on-chain sleuth ZachXBT accused the SMASH development team of purchasing 78% of the coin supply in an attempt to conduct a pump and dump.
Memecoin SMASH is a separate project from the privacy coin SmashCash, which uses the same ticker symbol.
In the post, Shamas apologizes to the players and “everyone affected by this. If there was anything I could have done differently,” he said the SMASH team “allowed us to record a short video promoting the launch (…) nothing more, nothing less,” and Chimaev said he had “no involvement” in the decision either.
SMASH was launched on July 2nd at 2 PM UTC. From 6 PM UTC to 10 PM UTC on the launch day, the price increased from $0.0001147 to $0.007308, a gain of 6,271%. According to data from DEXScreener, after hitting its all-time high, it fell 94% the next day, settling at $0.0004209 by 8 PM UTC on July 3rd.
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On July 4, blockchain researcher ZachXBT released the results of an investigation into coin trading, claiming that over 78% of the coin supply was purchased by “insiders and dev wallets” at launch.
The fact that the development team purchased a large number of tokens at launch suggests that they plan to sell them for profit later, causing the price to crash. ZachXBT claims that they did not track these purchases until the destination sale, and that they “stopped tracking” after the initial token purchase.
On July 8, ZachXBT responded to Shammas’ apology, claiming that Chimaev’s management did more than simply allow the production of the promotional video. “Khamzat had made two separate posts about the coin before it was deleted,” the blockchain researcher said, adding, “So your story of nothing more or less is completely false.”
SMASH is the latest in a string of high-profile mimecoins that have been accused of pump-and-dump scams. On July 2, rapper Sexyy Red’s PRESI project was criticized after the team was accused of buying up 90% of the coin’s supply at launch. On June 13, Andrew Tate’s DADDY project was also accused of buying up 30% of the supply at launch.
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