How to lose money on cryptocurrencies

On his Twitter account, Portnoy posted a short video showing a man notifying the millionaire of the lawsuit in the early hours of the morning. In fact, this was one of the main reasons for the discontent. Although Portnoy has already suffered significant losses due to his investment, he now has to deal with the problems associated with the lawsuit.

Are you kidding me? Today I woke up to this guy knocking on my door at 8:00 in the morning for ten minutes straight. I thought I was being robbed, but no. All he said was that I was being sued for a SafeMoon shilling. Looks like I’m the only one who lost all the money on this project and got a subpoena on top of it.

As a reminder, shilling is the promotion of a certain cryptocurrency project. The term is usually used in a negative context because sometimes shillers do not reveal their intentions, but do so as if they are sincere. Obviously, someone perceived Portnoy's publications about the cryptocurrency in question as such. Well, he uses the argument about losing money as a cover and proof of lack of communication with the project developers.

Here’s another quote from the millionaire, published by the news outlet Decrypt.

This is the hundredth time I’ve said that I haven’t made any profit from Safemoon. I stated to people that the project might be a scam even before I invested my money in it.

Why he invested in a project whose prospects he was unsure about and even considered a possible scam is unknown. However, the fact is that Portnoy can afford to lose tens of thousands of dollars because he is a famous and wealthy media personality. Dave's Twitter followers, on the other hand, may have misjudged their own options and lost more than they needed to.

Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy

As a reminder, SafeMoon is a cryptocurrency whose main idea is to “tax” its transactions and then redistribute them to token holders. The project runs on BNB Chain, formerly Binance Smart Chain, which is the blockchain of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, Binance. SafeMoon was very popular last year, causing the startup to generate a lot of hype near itself, and it and other tokens with a similar model have soared significantly in value.

The price of the old SafeMoon token over the entire trading period

Tailor succumbed to the hype and invested $40,000 in the coin that year. A little later, he even called it his “favourite shiatcoin”. However, the investment turned out to be a serious failure. On August 8, the millionaire posted a screenshot of the token’s balance on his Twitter account. His investment is now valued at just $2,370, meaning he suffered just under $38,000 in unrealized losses.

A screenshot of Portnoy’s wallet

Why unrealised? Tailor refuses to sell the token. In a caption to the tweet, he stated that he has "diamond hands" and is willing to keep SafeMoon on his wallet almost indefinitely without recording a loss. As a reminder, "diamond hands" is a very well-known meme in the crypto industry, referring to the most unshakable long-term investors who can survive any rate changes.

On top of that, Portnoy said he was also being sued by SafeMoon itself – possibly for “trashing” the project on his show – but wouldn’t elaborate. In a separate tweet, the millionaire shared a screenshot of a SafeMoon sales manager expressing displeasure with the Barstool Sports founder for giving the company a “bad look and unfair representation”. The manager also stated that Portnoy had still not followed the procedure for switching to the new version of the token.

Lawsuit against Dave Portnoy

The SafeMoon team launched the migration of the project to the new contract address late last year. However, this event did not lead to the growth of the token, so the manager’s claim about the migration is rather strange. Below is the chart of SafeMoon V2 for the entire time the token has been traded.

SafeMoon token chart over time

To conclude: this is not Dave Portnoy’s first negative experience with cryptocurrencies. In August 2020, he invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in Bitcoin and even met with the founders of crypto exchange Gemini, the Winklevoss brothers, to “get him up to speed”. All was well at first, but the first local collapse in the BTC price made Portnoy panic and sell his coins. Within a few weeks, Bitcoin started rising rapidly and hit an all-time high several times. So Portnoy is simply out of luck with crypto. And he’d be better off walking the same Bitcoin instead of a non-serious meme coin.


We think meme coins more often than not don't deserve to be floated, so Portnoy clearly bet on the wrong project. Obviously, he should have done it with Bitcoin, which Dave managed to buy at a good price in the process. Hopefully he will draw conclusions and remember this lesson, and his subscribers will not take the entrepreneur's actions as financial advice.