A version of this article was published in TIME’s newsletter Into the Metaverse. Subscribe for a weekly guide to the future of the Internet. You can find past issues of the newsletter here.
Last year, a group of influencers started promoting an initiative that seemed altruistic and honorable on its surface. The initiative was a crypto token called Save the Kids, which influencers purported would help children in need while making its investors money. Several of the influencers were connected to FaZe Clan, a community of esports gamers with millions of followers—many of them teenagers. The idea made a lot of sense: to leverage the massive popularity of influencers and the power of cryptonomics to raise money for the less fortunate.
It didn’t work out that way. The token’s value plummeted within days of launch, with large holders immediately dumping their shares. FaZe Clan supporters who had invested in the project complained of losing their money on Twitter. As of today, Save the Kids is virtually worthless. While Save the Kids claimed to have donated over $80,000 to Binance Charity in June 2021, a representative for Binance Charity confirmed to TIME that since they do not accept altcoin campaigns (i.e. newly created tokens outside of the most prominent ones, like Ether and Bitcoin), the supposed donation never went to charitable…
