Binance taps TikTok’s mostly silent superstar Khaby Lame to explain how crypto works – TechCrunch

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Kha­by Lame is quite lit­er­al­ly on top of the world (if Tik­Tok fol­low­er counts are the world). After attend­ing his first Vid­Con and sur­pass­ing Char­li D’Amelio as the most fol­lowed Tik­Tok­er, the Ital­ian-Sene­galese come­di­an signed on as an ambas­sador for Binance, the world’s largest plat­form for buy­ing and sell­ing cryp­tocur­ren­cies. Just last week, Binance snagged a part­ner­ship with soc­cer star Cris­tiano Ronal­do, who wants to “change the NFT game.”

These high-pro­file part­ner­ships come at a trou­bling time for cryp­to. In May, the pop­u­lar cryp­tocur­ren­cy Ter­raUSD col­lapsed, mean­ing that any­one who had invest­ed in the coin lost all of the mon­ey they put in. Then, in the face of a macro­eco­nom­ic down­turn, cryp­to com­pa­nies like Coin­base, Crypto.com, Block­Fi and Gem­i­ni have con­duct­ed lay­offs, and the prices of top cryp­tocur­ren­cies have dropped as much as 35% week over week. Basi­cal­ly, any­one who has invest­ed in cryp­tocur­ren­cy is feel­ing a bit ner­vous right now, unless they’re so bull­ish that they’re unfazed by Bit­coin reach­ing a price of over $60,000 in Novem­ber, then drop­ping to around $20,000 today. So it could be a bad look for cre­ators to turn around and encour­age their fol­low­ers to check out Binance.

That hasn’t stopped Kha­by Lame, though. Today, he post­ed a video to his fol­low­ers — 145 mil­lion on Tik­Tok and 78 mil­lion on Insta­gram —  in which he appears as a Binance-brand­ed super­hero, sav­ing the day as a friend types “WTF is web3???” on “Boogle.”

Lame rose to inter­net star­dom for his videos where he spoofs over-com­pli­cat­ed life hacks and makes them sim­ple. With­out speak­ing, he flips open his hands as if to say, “Look, I fixed it.” Binance said in a press release that Lame will apply this Tik­Tok for­mat to videos about web3, try­ing to sim­pli­fy com­plex con­cepts for his fol­low­ers. That may be hard for him to accom­plish in his videos, though, since he rarely speaks.

In a state­ment, Lame said, “I con­sid­er my fol­low­ers as my fam­i­ly, and I am always look­ing for new chal­lenges and inter­est­ing con­tent to share with them. I’ve been curi­ous about web3 for some time, and jumped at the chance to part­ner with a leader like Binance because it aligns per­fect­ly with what I usu­al­ly do: make com­plex stuff easy and fun for everyone!”

Lame has also weighed in on emerg­ing (and poten­tial­ly fleet­ing) tech­nol­o­gy by part­ner­ing with Meta to adver­tise the meta­verse — he appeared in a video on the tech giant’s cor­po­rate accounts along­side Mark Zuckerberg.

As brand ambas­sadors, both Kha­by Lame and Cris­tiano Ronal­do will make NFTs, which their fans can buy and trade.

Some com­pa­nies like Pear­pop — backed by The Chainsmok­ers, Alex­is Ohan­ian, Mark Cuban and Snoop Dogg — think that web3 can pow­er the future of the cre­ator econ­o­my. But some vet­er­ans of the indus­try think that the space is too volatile to trust right now.

“I am very bear­ish on NFTs per­son­al­ly,” long­time YouTu­ber Hank Green said on stage at Vid­Con last week — but he joked that he could be wrong, since he thought YouTube would nev­er sup­port HD video. He lat­er added, “I don’t want to sell some­one some­thing that might not be valuable.”

Fans’ trust in a cre­ator can change dras­ti­cal­ly depend­ing on the rep­u­ta­tion of the brands they pro­mote, but brand deals are vir­tu­al­ly unavoid­able for a cre­ator look­ing to make reli­able income. Espe­cial­ly on Tik­Tok, where cre­ator fund pay­outs are shrink­ing, cre­ators aren’t being paid enough from the plat­form alone. With ambas­sadors like Lame and Ronal­do, Binance must be shelling out some seri­ous cash, but for these stars, that pay­ment comes at the cost of poten­tial push­back and out­rage down the road.



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