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“We need to crash Solana”: Andrew Tate embarks on meme coin spending spree
Controversial right-wing Internet figure Andrew Tate is back in the limelight, with his latest ploy to cultivate online engagement as he awaits trial on rape and human trafficking charges: shilling Solana meme coins.
Friday, the former kickboxer and self-proclaimed misogynist, who once disavowed cryptocurrencies as a scam: They began promoting various Solana tokens and posting incendiary racist statements on Twitter in rapid succession, creating a typically chaotic social media storm.
The chaos began when Tate first published, last Friday, that he would have “diamond hands” in random assets worth $1 million if he received a certain number of retweets on the post. “Diamond hands” is internet idiom for owning an asset for the long term, regardless of price movement, due to belief in the asset.
Before long, the post reached Tate’s engagement goal, and the social media influencer posted, “GET CRASH THE SOLANA NETWORK,” implying that he planned to buy so many tokens on the chain that it would collapse. (According to Solana it currently performs around 1,900 transactions per second Solscan.)
Tate then guest the hordes of degen throw their “trash” tokens at him, saying he would choose a select number to sweep away.
He soon claimed to have purchased $10,000 of miscellaneous items Pump.fun Solana meme coins, included one mocking a Twitter user Tate disparaged and one disparaging pop singer Madonna. She also appeared to have purchased a German-themed Solana token only after the token team agreed to refer to him as “Fuhrer,” the title strongly associated with Adolf Hitler.
However, it appears that the Tate has yet to spend anywhere near the promised $1 million in investment. Although she has regularly made lofty claims about her wealth and investments in cryptocurrencies in recent months – an essential component of his playboy image – his situation became significantly more precarious last year, when Romanian authorities accused him and his brother of rape, human trafficking and forming an organized criminal group to sexually exploit women.
In March, British authorities issued a separate arrest warrant for the Tate brothers on charges related to rape and sexual assault. Romanian authorities agreed to extradite the influencer only after the conclusion of the trial in their country.
Tate is currently in Romania awaiting trial. He is forbidden to leave the country.