David Portnoy — the founder of famous sports blog Barstool Sports — is now promoting memecoins, leading to controversy.
Portnoy jokingly mentioned that he started trading low-cap tokens with little to no fundamental value in a recent X post. He wrote of himself in third person:
“Uh oh. Davey learned how to trade shitcoin and is already up a billion percent on my 1st one!”
The post featured a screenshot of his — rather profitable — trade of Montoya Por Favor (MONTOYA), a memecoin dedicated to the Spanish edition of Temptation Island. The token reached a market cap of nearly $14 million, but its success was short-lived and it soon crushed to its current $1.4 million market cap.
Portnoy then started talking about the Josh Allen (MVP) memecoin dedicated to the homonymous Buffalo Bills quarterback in another post. “I think I can make a million back on Josh Allen MVP coin,” he said. He also started giving disclaimers:
“Buy at your own risk. I just bought it. I’m gonna sell it. Don’t buy what ya can’t lose.”
The controversy
Josh Allen also quickly rose in value, reaching a market cap of over $12 million. Just like Montoya Por Favor, this token also crashed and as of press time, its market cap is under $60,000.
Crypto traders accused Portnoy of dumping his holdings on his followers, but he defended himself by pointing out his transparency — he said that he would sell. He said during a recent video post:
“I turned like 10 grand total into like 75 grand…I don’t even know what I’m doing with my life. […] Do you go to jail for this? Can I not do this?”
Undefeated, Portnoy then started promoting the JAILSTOOL token in subsequent X posts. This time, he outright told his followers that he may “dump” the token in question:
“I think whoever made this coin is funny and I want to collect it as a memory of you bitches crying like little babies. I may dump it eventually but I’ll let all you righteous losers dump on each other first. So don’t put in more than you can lose. This hobby game is the hobby game. Don’t put in more than you can lose.”
