Notorious Crypto Celeb Meme Coin Promoter Plots Second Wave on New Launchpad

Sahil Arora, the notorious promoter behind a string of 2024 celebrity meme coins, just launched a new one, with Floyd Mayweather’s social media accounts briefly promoting it. Arora told Decrypt it’s the start of a comeback: he wants to revive the celebrity coin craze on Solana trading platform Fomo, the same trick that made his name on Pump.fun.

Arora made his name through a series of celebrity-linked meme coin launches on Pump.fun in 2024. It started with former Olympian Caitlyn Jenner, who went on to claim that Arora “scammed” her. Since then, he has been tied to several other projects that celebrities and industry experts have labelled as “rug pulls” or simply fraudulent.

His latest entry is the Floyd Money Mayweather meme coin launched on Fomo, which peaked at just a $1 million market cap before plummeting 96% over the next three hours on Wednesday. 

Mayweather’s social media account promoted the token, according to several social media accounts, before selling from the deployer wallet for just $5,000 worth of profit and deleting the posts. The token then pumped to its $1 million market cap peak, which meant the wallet lost out on major profits—but Arora says this was all part of the plan.

The coin promoter told Decrypt that the entire scheme was orchestrated, explaining that the narrative of Mayweather fumbling gains was what pushed the token’s price higher. Fomo is a trading platform that blends social media elements, meaning that you can see who is buying and selling—which can create viral moments.

Arora claims to have profited seven-figures on the Mayweather token by selling from other wallets. However, on-chain analytics firm Bubblemaps doesn’t think that is realistic. The biggest connected cluster of wallets profited approximately $105,000, Bubblemaps told Decrypt, and the top 100 traders combined only made $306,000 worth of profit. So, the analytics firm said numbers aren’t adding up.

Still, it appears that the crypto coin promoter stood to profit handsomely from the scheme and is plotting to do it again.

“We will recreate everything on Fomo that we made on Pump.fun in 2024, just with better strategies where people also win,” Arora told Decrypt. When pushed on the new strategies, he said, “this wasn’t [sold in] one clip,” in contrast to previous projects that have faced “rug pull” accusations after dropping more than 90% in seconds.

He added that he is “tight” with all of the celebrities that he launches tokens with, and convincing them to be part of his schemes is “really easy.”

In 2024, Pump.fun provided Arora with a platform to easily create tokens for celebrities to promote via social media chatter. Now, Fomo has created a trading environment that drives virality, and Arora wants to take advantage of that.

This isn’t Mayweather’s first crypto rodeo. In 2017, he asked fans to start calling him Floyd ‘Crypto’ Mayweather, dropping his usual ‘money’ moniker, as he started to plug a streak of token sales.

One of those sales was the Centra Tech initial coin offering, or ICO, which raised $32 million for a crypto debit card it told investors was backed by Visa and Mastercard—it wasn’t. By 2018, he was charged by the SEC for promoting the sale without disclosing that he’d been paid. He later agreed to pay a fine and not promote any security for three years.

But in 2021, he gained even more heat for his promotion of an obscure Ethereum-based token named EthereumMax. The boxer turned up to a Bitcoin conference wearing an EthereumMax and was booed by the crowd for suggesting other tokens could succeed in front of a crowd of Bitcoin maximalists. Mayweather was named alongside Kim Kardashian in a lawsuit regarding EthereumMax, though the judge dismissed it by the end of 2022.

This Arora-linked token is just the latest chapter in Mayweather’s long, messy history with crypto.

Floyd Mayweather did not respond to Decrypt‘s request for comment.