Popular crypto trader and YouTuber Brian Jung says he’s been turning down offers from crypto companies wanting to partner up ever since he was caught with his pants down when FTX collapsed.
He admits it was one of the “lowest moments” of his career.
“I’ve actually turned down more than seven figures in sponsorship deals and even things like KOL [key opinion leader] partnerships that a lot of influencers do,” Jung tells Hall of Flame.
“Since FTX, we’ve learned our lesson and we’re very careful when working with any company,” he adds.
Jung even said no to crypto exchange Coinbase, which he reckons is “way different” to FTX because it is a publicly traded company on the U.S. stock market.
It’s much harder to cook the books FTX-style when you have to regularly disclose company financials to the public.
Jung also got caught up in a massive billion-dollar class-action lawsuit along with a bunch of other celebs and influencers who had endorsement deals with FTX before its bankruptcy.
Pretty nerve-wracking for a guy who was only 25. In the end, he essentially did the whole FTX influencer gig for free.
“We ended up actually settling with them. So we’re one of the few people to settle with them and that just means that we actually paid back the money that we got from the FTX sponsorships.”
Although he has a relatively modest X following of 61,400 users, the bulk of his audience tunes in to his YouTube channel for hot crypto tips. There, he boasts 1.78 million subscribers.
He’s unsure how many he actually convinced to join FTX, and although he’s settled with the plaintiffs, he thinks the big beneficiaries are the lawyers.
“At the end of the day the people who are actually making money from this are the lawyers that represent the so-called victims,” he says.
Even though Jung was “very dangerously close to losing everything” in FTX, he’s still been able to take care of his parents’ mortgage and give them a monthly…
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