Mariah Carey backs Bitcoin in a new partnership with the Winklevoss twins’ Gemini crypto exchange

• Pop star Mariah Carey is encouraging her followers to get on the Winklevoss twins’ crypto exchange, Gemini, and buy Bitcoin.
• Bitcoin is the world's oldest cryptocurrency and has the largest market capitalisation — hitting an all time high of $1.2 trillion on Tuesday.
• Back in 2017, she was among the 45 musicians that offered a 15% discount on merchandise as a part of ‘Project Coral Reef’, if buyers used cryptocurrency Monero to make the payment.

Canadian pop-music idol, Mariah Carey, is joining the legion of celebrities buying Bitcoin to diversify their portfolios. The five-time Grammy Award winner has hitched her crypto wagon to the Gemini crypto exchange, founded by the Winklevoss twins — Cameron and Tyler — famous for suing Mark Zuckerberg over the idea for Facebook.


In a video posted on Twitter and Instagram, Carey is offering fans $20 worth of Bitcoin for free on signing up with Gemini. A portion of the trade done by these investors, which was not specified, will go towards Black Girls Code — a non-profit based out of the US that focuses on providing technology education for African-American girls.

This isn’t Carey’s first foray into the crypto world. Back in 2017, the singer — along with 45 other musicians like the Backstreet Boys, Dolly Parton, Marilyn Manson, Sia and others — accepted privacy-coin Monero as a form of payment.

The crypto market is known for being largely speculated and celebrity endorsements have been running a theme. However, not all cryptocurrencies have been around as long as Bitcoin or Ethereum. The initiative, called Project Coral Reef, offered fans an additional 15% off purchases made during the holiday season.

The crypto market is hot bed of influencers — not all of them good

The crypto market has always been speculative, and hence, a hotbed of influencer activity. Rapper Snoop Dog recently outed himself as the prominent non-fungible token (NFT) influencer, CozmoMedici.

He went on to announce a partnership with the metaverse project Sandbox, where fans would be able to party with the rapper within a digital recreation of his mansion.

But, not everyone has been touted for their participation in the crypto world. Tesla and SpaceX CEO, Elon Musk, for instance, has often been criticised for increasing the volatility around Bitcoin and Dogecoin with his comments on Twitter.

Meanwhile, Kim Kardashian was recently under the gun after she promoted a cryptocurrency called ‘Ethereum Max’ on her Instagram account — not to be confused with the original Ethereum blockchain or its native token, Ether.

The head of UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), Charles Randell, accused Kardashian of encouraging her 250 million plus followers to speculate on crypto tokens. "I can't say whether this particular token [Ethereum Max] is a scam, but social media influencers are routinely paid by scammers to help them pump and dump new tokens on the back of pure speculation,” he said at the Cambridge International Symposium on Economic Crime.

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