Justin Bieber’s past comes back to haunt amid Diddy, Hillsong, and NFT issues
Justin Bieber is back in the news for all the wrong reasons. As his fans have bid farewell to his boyish charm and begrudgingly accepted his 30-year age, they are also realizing that Bieber has made very adult mistakes. These include promoting a $1,600 NFT collection that now trades below a $150 floor.
Videos of Bieber have caught the public’s attention this week, specifically those that show that he spent significant one-on-one time with Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs when he was a youngster. Video evidence of their interactions ignited his fanbase over concerns of potential sexual abuse and couple of weeks ago, US Department of Homeland Security and FBI agents raided Diddy’s mansions in Miami and Los Angeles after a series of lawsuits.
Bieber also attended, endorsed, and briefly lived with Carl Lentz, the pastor of disgraced church Hillsong. Lentz admitted to cheating on his wife for months but despite this, Bieber fanatically endorsed Hillsong and considered Lentz his Christian mentor.
Justin Bieber promotes a doomed NFT collection
In another poor life decision, Bieber promoted the NFT collection inBetweeners in December 2021, proclaiming they were his “first NFTs.” He reiterated that endorsement several times. The cost to mint one NFT was 0.45 ETH ($1,600) but in the years since Bieber’s enthusiastic recommendations, the prices of those NFTs have declined over 90%.
Read more: The NFT market bubble has popped and we’ve got the charts to prove it
Bieber’s public Ethereum wallet paid above-market rates during the launch phase; between $2,400 and $3,600. It didn’t take long for the collection to hit its bubble peak and during the final week of 2021, OpenSea sold 3,229 inBetweeners at an average price of 1.33 ETH ($4,800) per NFT.
Collectors have never seen those prices since.
Today, those same NFTs are reselling on OpenSea for less than $140 (0.04 ETH). Even excluding minting gas fees, in USD that’s a 91% loss below mint or a 97% loss from the average price during the final week of 2021.
Concerningly, Bieber failed to disclose his compensation while promoting the project on both Instagram and Twitter.
Read more: These six-figure NFTs are down 99%
Why Justin Bieber promoted inBetweeners NFTs
According to inBetweeners co-founder Gianpiero D’Alessandro, he met Bieber while Bieber and Ryan Good were working on the clothing brand House of Drew. D’Allessandro created illustrations for them, including a cartoon teddy bear that became the inspiration for inBetweeners NFTs.
Pasquale ‘Pavi’ V. D’Avino recalled that Bieber was enthusiastic about the collection. Bieber’s public wallet became one of the first to mint an NFT from the collection and he would post about inBetweeners to his Instagram account’s 20 million followers. He also helped with details like creating an NFT collection roadmap.
Although Bieber barely uses X (formerly Twitter) and hasn’t even bothered to post in over a year, his seventh most recent tweet is about inBetweeners. That was at the top of the bubble, of course: a December 22, 2021 retweet of the inBetweeners Discord chat.
Since then, inBetweeners has plummeted by 97% in ETH terms.
In short, Bieber promoted an NFT collection at its most expensive price possible. Depending on whether you denominate in USD and whether you calculate based on the mint or high price, any long-term holder has lost at least 90% of their purchase price. Bieber was even spotted at an inBetweeners event in 2022, as the price was steadily collapsing.
Like many of his decisions, it has only got worse since.
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